Angry Y o ung Man

by the same author

*

autobiography
THE LIVING H E D G E
H E R O N LAKE: A N O RF O LK

(Faber & Faber)

Y E A R (Batchworth PresJ)

on the crisis
THE ANNI H I LATION OF M A N

(Faber & Faber)

(Faber & Faber)

(Faber & Faber)

THE J\.IE A N I N G OF H U M A N EXI S T E N C E

T H E A G E OF T E R R O R

no veis
(Denis Archer)
O D Y S S E Y (Denis Archer)
MA Y (Gollancz:.)

F U GITIVE M O R N I N G
P E RIWAKE: H I S
M E N IN

on the youth movement

(Noe! Douglas)
THE G R E E N C O MPA N Y ( The C. W. Daniel Co.)
R EPUBL I C OF C H I L D R E N (Alten & Unwin)
T H E F O LK T R A l L

poems
EXI L E A N D O T H E R P O E M S

(The Caravel Press)

LESLIE PAUL

ANGRY YOUNG

MAN

F ABER AND F ABER LTD

24 Russell Square
London

First published in mcmli

by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russel! Square London W.C.I
Second impression mcmlii
'
Printed in Great Britain by
Page Brothers (Norwich) Ltd
All rights reserved

To
my brothers and sisters,
above all to the youngest,
J OAN and DouGLAS

Contents

I.
Il.
Ill.

p age

THE B O Y ON T H E B E A C H

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E ET STREET
'

oH Y O U N G M E N O H Y O U N G C O M R A D E S

32
'

50

IV.

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

75

V.

D E A T H O F AN I N F O R M E R

92

VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.

THE D E D ICATED LIFE

I0 3

D E AT H O F A S P A C E S E L L E R

I2 7

E U R O P E A N P ERSPE CTIVES

I 39

T H E L E N IN I S T C I R C U S

I 55

'

N O T H I N G IS I N N O C E N T

'

D E C L I N E OF T H E Y O U T H M O VE M E N T

78

I9

D E A T H O F A C H AR

20 7

XIII.

R E D P O P LA R

2I 7

XIV.

F ES T I V A L A N D T E R R O R

2 38

THE NIGHT O F THE LAND-MINE

2 58

XVI.

T H E D A Y OF T H E S O L D I E R

273

XVII.

D I A L O G U E O F T H E H E A RT

284

N O T MY D E S E R VI N G

2 97

XV.

XVIII.

G R E Y U N E M P L OY E D

C H A P T ER O N E

The Boy o n the Beach

n my youth Aldgate High Street had a character it has now

lost. Despite the traffic roaring through it, all
dazzle, fume and fury, which made it impossible to see it as
one calm whole except on idle and drowsy Sunday afternoons,
it was as hough, early in the morning when the streets were
still half-empty and the shadows long, one had walked out of
the throbbing city and stumbled upon the High Street of a
seaport or prosperous country town. A handpump still stood
at the City end, where the High Street bifurcated, and Petticoat
Lane, the most remarkable Sunday market in the world, at the
other. Closing the street in the northern distance was the
parish church of Whitechapel, now a shell, but then raising a
graceless Victorian steeple above its own oasis of plane trees
and poplars. The little old pub called Ye Hoop and Grapes,
with its wrought-iron lamp bracket and coloured plaster
mouldings of grapevines, and bright square windows, looked
across paving stones to the toffee and fancy goods stalls standing
in the gutter. Muscular carmen and porters stood in its tiny
forecourt drinking great mugs of beer just as they must have
done in the eighteenth century when the waggons from Poplar
shipyards stopped outside its doors. And, towering above all,
rose the handsome church of St. Botolph's at the corner of
Houndsditch: there had been a church of St. Botolph on that
corner since the twelfth century, perhaps even since the last
of the Danish kings-in the days indeed when Houndsditch
was no street of clothing warehouses, but a filthy open sewer.
It was an eighteenth-century church, much restored, raising
above the street a curiously fashioned spire, punched through

I almost

l l

T H E BOY ON THE DE ACH

with rounded lanterns like great portholes. Green-painted tubs

of geraniums stood in its square of grimy garden in brilliant
contrast to the handsome blue doors set in porches of cream.
Behind the church, in the cool waving shadow of plane and
acacia trees, the poor clerks, like myself, came at midday to
eat their sandwiches : in the afternoon and evening the
unemployed crawled out of the sun to drowse in the shade.
Even the ornately tiled Metropolitan railway station, a few
yards away, had a provincial look which has since disappeared,
and the trams from Poplar and Bow, Stepney and East Ham,
which had their noisy terminus at one end of the street, did not
destroy its parish snugness, for, alighting from them, it was
possible to imagine that one had arrived at the country rather
than the city end of their journey. Yet in the course of time the
small parish outside the old city gate had become the heart of a
vast hinterland, of street upon street of unending slum, of
grimy courtyards, of decaying merchants' houses where
hob-nailed boots had splintered Adam doorways, and soot
obscured lovely ceiling mouldings, and sweatshop candles
guttered down Italianate marble mantel-pieces. There were
alleys stinking of cats and piss and human vomit where Jack
the Ripper had disembowelled his women victims, and
uniform rows of uniformly dingy cottages facing streets down
which soiled fish-and-chip papers sailed in the wind like gulls
and children chalked their naive confessions of love on fencc
and pavement-all this stretching for mile upon mile like those
vertiginous lines of perspective which meet only in eternity;
every main road vanished far, far away in some human swamp.
Sometimes I penetrated to East Ham or Leytonstone, Barking
or North Woolwich, riding with my friends in the front ofswaying
and groaning trams past incalculable miles of street lamps made
starry by the blurring rain and unsteady by gusts of winter
winds.
Aldgate High Street had become the city approach of one
quarter of London, the East End, the funne! through which
everything was driven to reach Lombard Street, Cornhill and
Thrcadneedle Street in which all the power and wealth of the
British Empire had crystallized into frowning and opulent
facades of Aberdeen and Cornish granite, Bath or Portland
stone. It had suffered, too, an invasion still more exotic, for it
was the heart of a foreign quarter. The Jews were everywhere :
12

THE BOY ON THE BEA C H

shy rabbis with chestnut beards and downcast glance slipped

gently past: daring Jewish beauties with long raven tresses and
melancholy eyes and jumpers of scarlet and gold, and swinging
ear-rings, were always walking in twos and threes to and from
the gown and shirt-making workshops. Squab, hairy Jewish
merchants with gesturing hands like captive birds, picked gold
teeth, which matched their gold watch chains, on the kerb out
side Lyons' Tea Shop. They carried on their deals outside and
played chess endlessly and emotionally inside. Along the east
side of the street ranged the kosher slaughter-houses where early
in the morning the priestly ceremonies of cattle slaughter which
go back to the days of Abraham were performed, and rivulets
of blood and water flowed across the paving stones into the
High Street gutters. Chinamen with pigtails tripped humbly
along, hand in hand with rosy, bright-eyed half-caste children,
and it was rare not to see a group of lascars walking down with
wondering and catlike tread, their bodies frail and under-sized
like the bodies of boys, their eyes sharp and clear, and their faces
so gentle and effeminate that moustaches seemed out of place
upon them. In the winter they looked blue, shrivelled and
frightened, like lost monkeys. Sometimes they wore fezzes, or
blue side caps, and argued in haunting flute-like tones, and with
the movements of ballet dancers, outside the slop shops patron
ized by seamen. There were mad denizens of this human jungle,
like the man I used to see striding blindly along with a lion's
mane of crinkled tawny hair which had never been cut through
out his whole life and which he protected from rain with an
umbrella; or 'Shouting Jack', the man whose progress city
wards consisted of leaps and contortions and wild swipes at
invisible enemies (rather like that madman Rilke describes with
such compassion in The Notebooks qf Malte Laurids Brigge)
against whom he kept up a tirade of abuse which no one could
understand for it was in the language of the Polynesian island
from which he had sprung.
Aldgate was an important part of my education : I could not
tear myself from its polyglot flow against the background of its
ruined I 8th-century beauty. I loved the sprawling and teeming
as much as I hated the boring and ugly and meaningless
suburbs. I swelled and choked with impotent rage on my daily
passage through them, desperate always to escape. I used to
clench my fists and mutter to myself, like some young Wellsian
13

T H E B O Y ON T H E BE A C H

hero, 'Why on earth do they put up with it? 1'11 not put up with
it, you'll see.' But who the 'you' was, who was to be made to
'see' -unless it was God-I have no idea.
In my brief lunch-hours in the East End, when, with perhaps
only eightpence or ninepence to spend I could not afford to buy
a meal unless I went to a workman's eating house (which I was
often too timid to do) I would walk round the streets with my
pockets stuffed with broken biscuits or fruit and stare at the
junk shops, brood over the Jewish beauties displaying their
oriental charms in the photographers along the High Street, or
browse through a vast, dusty book warehouse at the top of the
Minories, dreaming of all the hooks I should like to possess,
or one day to write. One day I should no longer be lonely,
underfed and discouraged, and achieve something which would
make the world accept me.
I could not afford a daily paper then, but at the week-ends
I bought John o' London's Week{y, which talked knowledgeably
about poets and authors, most of whom, to my shame, I had
never heard of. English literature at school had ended with
Tennyson-like 'history' one imagined it to be something past
and done with-and the hooks I had read since leaving school
had been accidental discoveries, or the recommendations of
frfends. It was therefore first in the pages ofJohn o' London's that
I glimpsed the existence of a contemporary hierarchy ofwriters.
One day I was excited to read in its pages a review of The
Story of My Heart by Richard J efferies. I had never heard of the
author before and what filled me with a blaze of illumination
was the discovery of yearnings in this writer which were the
exact counterpart of my own. I had to have The Story rif My
Heart: borrowing it from the library, had that occurred to me in
my agitation, would not have sufficed. The quotations printed
in the review revealed so intimate a spirit that a grubby,
defiled library copy would have been unbearable to handle.
The problem was how to afford it? I handed my weekly wage
of 22s. 6d. to my parents and was paid back a shilling a day
'dinner money', much ofwhich mysteriously disappeared befare
dinner came round. My parents had to clothe and feed me,
buy my season ticket, and give me pocket-money out of what
was left. Working as a junior clerk in the City of London was
a highly unprofitable business all round and I used to ache with
the intolerable sense of being too worthless to earn even my
I4

T H E B O Y ON THE B E A C H

modest keep in a house where every shilling counted. I walked

through the city at lunch hour with the glowing sentences of
Jefferies in my head, hardly able to endure the burning stones
of the July pavements because of the longing to rush out to
some country place and be quite alone while I turned over like
a jewel in my hand the revelation that he promised. I came in
the end to a little book shop in Leadenhall Street. Its window
was often filled with remainders, and marked-down new hooks:
there was a tray of secondhand hooks outside which I could
never resist looking through. I was in anguish about the 3s. 6d.,
a week's pocket money, I clutched in my pocket: the conse
quences of spending it or not spending it seemed equally bitter.
I felt sure that when I produced it my hot face and nervous
manner would reveal that it was all the money I had. I
developed the fever common to these occasions, counting my
money over and over again in my pocket to make sure I had the
right amount and would not have to retire in a confusion which
exposed my poverty. Yet when, baving screwed up my courage,
I went in to ask for The Story cifMy Heart the bookseller scratched
his head in perplexity and said he 'didn't happen to have it in
stock' but if I knew who wrote it, and who the publisher was,
he would order it. I was astonished that a book to which a page
had just been devoted in John o' London's should be unknown to
a bookseller, but I had to say, breathlessly, yes, please order it,
for I entirely lacked the self-assurance to walk out of his shop
and look for another. Yet having decided to spend my entire
pocket money at one go, it was intolerable to be cheated of the
pleasure, and to have to wait several days for the release of the
tension which Jefferies' words had raised in me. I had to find
something else to sink into, or I should have been incapable
even of sitting still: I wandered shyly round the shop pulling
hooks off the shelves. I lighted on a book about the Kaffirs by
Dudley Kidd. This roused me immediately, for it was axiomatic
in the youth movements which had up to then influenced me
that the life of savages was far superior to that of civilized man.
This had been the theme of Baden-Powell-I could then have
quoted his very words on the abilities of native trackers. I had
read Ernest Thompson Seton's lament over the decline and
fall of the noble Red Indian, and shared his indignation at the
perfid y of the white man towards him. Dudley Kidd's book was
something into which I could pl unge while the word of Richard
15

TH E B O Y ON THE BEACH

Jefferies was suspended over me like a sword. It was marked

down to two shillings and I bought it impulsively, and carried
it home without daring to look at it until I was safe in the
privacy of my little room, still decorated with the pine boughs I
had brought back from a memorable excursion up the Thames
to Marlow. I stared first of all at the plates of the dignified
black children, striving hard to understand their inscrutable
lives, and then plunged confusedly and guiltily into details of
obscure Kaffir birth ceremonies.
Because of my rashness I had to put up with a second week
of pennilessness before I could call for the book I had ordered.
Its slightness shocked me. Three shillings and sixpence was a
lot to give for a slender little book which went with ease into
my jacket pocket. I had inherited my mother's dread of being
'swindled', and felt the blood rush to my face as I handled it,
but I was compensated as I walked back to the office with the
book, snug in my pocket, gently falling and lifting against my
thigh, by the superior feeling that I had bought a book few
other people would ever think of buying. I could not resist
showing it to Winnie Franklin, with whom I was working on
the share ledgers. She had eyes as liquid-large and yearning
brown as a spaniel's, and one did not so much gaze at them as
swim quite lost within their peaty waters. ' "The Story of My
Heart"?' she read, making roguish eyes at me. 'Naughty
naughty ! I thought you were above that sort of thing!' I was
so outraged at this that I would not talk to her for a long time.
But when a lull came in the office work, and I could steal
another look, I sat and inscribed my name in the book, and
dated it: 28th July, 1 9 22.
All that I learnt of Richard Jefferies saddened me. His
genius went unappreciated during his lifetime; he was poor
and overworked for most of his days and for years wrestled with
the tuberculosis which eventually killed him in the face of the
obstinate insistence of doctors that he was imagining it all.
Everything that he did was marked with hopeless struggle, for
his contemporary world rejected him. I did not know then that
he had spent many boyhood days in a house at Sydenham, no
more than twenty minutes from where I was living, and which
still then looked across meadows to the spire of Christchurch, or
I should have made many pilgrimages to th spot. But if his
life was despair as mine too, already, seemed to be despair,
J6

T H E BOY ON T H E BEA C H

his spirit glowed the more for it, rich i n that sensuous paganism
I sought in youth movements.
'It is in myself that I desire increase, profit, and exaltation of
body, mind and soul. The surroundings, the clothes, the dwell
ing, the social status, the circumstances are to me utterly
indifferent. Let the floor of the room be bare, let the furniture
be a plank table, the bed a mere pallet. Let the house be plain
and simple, but in the midst of light and air. These are enough
-a cave would be enough; in a warmed climate the open air
would suffice. Let me be furnished with health, safety, strength,
the perfection of physical existence; let my mind be furnished
with the highest soul life. . . .
What halm those words were for me ! The insincerity of the
'simple-life' pose, now more apparent, did not occur to me then,
for I was not old enough to understand that no writer can be
content for long with a cave, or a bed in the open air, away
from his books and writing materials, and all the assurance
which he draws from the art, the writings and the lives of others.
Even if the words were not true for Jefferies, even ifhe had been
led by his own exaltation into rhetoric, they were exactly true
for me. I spent every day which I could steal to myself away in
the country, walking or camping. A tent, or even a sleeping-bag
in the open air, was the longed-for goal to which I would hurry
away at week-ends even in the dead of winter. In the country,
the burden of city life would lift its iron blanket from me, and
I would feel myself come alive once more. The demand for a
simple life, the assertion of its superiority over all contemporary
ways of living, was the core of the testament of the youth move
ments to which I belonged.
Richard jefferics, by the sheer weight of his spiritual power,
drove through the paganism of brown body and white sun, with
which his own exalting experiences began, to a pantheism of a
subtle and metaphysical character, very similar to that which
was fast becoming my own refuge now that I had abandoned
the Christian orthodoxy in which I had been brought up by
my loving and deeply-religious mother. Again and again,
Jefferies spoke ofprayer: his book was one long prayer, and this
comforted me greatly for prayer was a habit of the soul I had
discovered it was most difficult to lose. But it was a new kind of
prayer, and the sincerity of it could not for one moment be
doubted. He flung himself on the grass, or he lay on his back
'

17

T H E BOY O N THE BEACH

under an oak in the starlight and prayed with the utmost

intensity of his being to the sun.
'The great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear
earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought of the ocean; the
inexpressible beauty filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an
inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed. Next to myself
I came and recalled myself, my bodily existence. I held out my
hand, the sunlight gleamed on the skin and the irridescent nails;
I recalled the mystery and beauty of the flesh. I thought of the
mind with which I could see the ocean sixty miles distant, and
gather to rr. vself its glory. I thought of my inner existence, that
consciousnes:, which is called the soul. These, that is, myself
I threw into the balance to weigh the prayer the heavier. My
strength of body, mind and soul, I fl ung in to it; I put forth my
strength; I wrestled and laboured, and toiled in might of
prayer . . . I hid myself in the grass, I was wholly prostrated, I
lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away.'
With just such intoxicating stuff was I trying to fill my own
diaries (which I always ended by burning) , for just so, times
without number, had I thrown myself to the earth, burying my
face in the grass, and prayed, with the sense of wanting some
thing beyond prayer, during lonely walks through the now
vanished meadows beyond Whitefoot Lane where the peewits
called over the ploughed land and corncrakes ran through the
ripening wheat. At the same time Richard Jefferies pulled me
up short. I found some of his arguments bewildering and
shocking. I was still in the spring of my days when 'the sounding
cataract haunted me like a passion' and
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

How could I accept his argument that nature was alien to

man? Every cell of my body revolted. My one need then was to
find in that which moved through all nature, including man,
the Divinity I could not now believe in elsewhere. But if nature
was alien to man, then that Divinity was alien too, and man was
alone and abandoned. I was puzzled and hostile too when
Jefferies spoke of the repulsive strangeness of the shapes and
natures of animals. Coming from a nature-lover there was a
18

THE BOY ON THE BEA C H

certain perversity i n this vievv. No, I could not stomach these

hard sayings, and many years were to pass before I could under
stand the honesty of spirit which led J efferies to make them.
The truth was that for Richard jefferies, by the time he had
reached the end of The Story of My Heart a glory had past away
from the earth, a glory which with all the strength of his soul
he sought to hold in his grasp to the very last. But the very
spiritual effort to encompass that physical glory, to saturate
himself with the richness of all the stuff of nature, was his
undoing. The more his soul yearned over nature, the less com
prehensible and the more impenetrable it became for him, like
the word we say over and over again in bed as children until
it loses all sense. Every human experience began to seem un
utterably strange to him, and every contact, except with his
own soul, a source of frustration. What is time, he asked, and
what is man?
'Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely
artificial arrangement. It is eternity, it always was eternity, and
always will be . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity,
the Now, is continuous. \.Vhen all the stars have revolved they
only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever.'
Perhaps there has never been in modem mysticism so intense
an effort to lift the soul into the still world of eternal forms,
and out of the ftux of natural things. But because of the passion
Jefferies displayed for the life of the immortal soul, it began to
seem to him that matter was the strangest of all experiences.
What is a clod of earth? What is the water in the brook?
'Matter is beyond understanding, mysterious, impenetrable.'
And again, a thought which I could not bear, 'All nature in the
universe, as far as we can see, is anti- or ultra-human, outside,
and has no concern for man. These things are unnatural to
him. By no course of reasoning, however tortuous, can nature
and the universe be fitted to the mind.'
God, if God there be, this atheist wrote, is beyond nature. He
has identity only with idea, or mind, or soul. But he was not
content with the concept God. He wanted something stronger,
and more meaningful, and so he spoke of Super-Deo, Super
God, as Nietzsche spoke of super-man. I think he was under the
inftuence of Nietzsche. Certainly it was the tremendous intellec
tual and spiritual effort which Jefferies made to come to grips
with the meaning of nature which mak es The Story of My Heart
19

T H E BOY ON T H E BE A C H

such a revelation, particularly t o the young. I t i s the life work

of a thoughtful man who has gone right through the superficial,
natura! scene, with all its beauty and enchantment, and
emerged on the other side, in the immortal country of the spirit.
I discovered in the Jefferies that I read then, a burning,
almost anguished sense not just of the glory but of the trans
parency of the world. I would put the book down after reading
a few pages to let my mind subside. The agitation certain
passages roused in me was so great that I never dared read in
company lest I had to cry out, in which case I was sure they
would think me mad.
At the August Bank holiday shortly after this, two unexpected
gifts made it possible for me to go away, on the impulse, for the
week-end. It was impossible for me to arrange anything with
my friend Roly: he was with my Scout troop, camping far away
in Devonshire. And I did not want company. I was on fire to
reach and swim again in the sea in solitariness, and could only
dream nostalgically of the sands of Margate and Westgate
where I had spent some magical childhood holidays. Jefferies'
bronze pagan sun was burning in me and I felt stifled at the
thought of mooning around alone at home, with nothing to do
except take my little brother and sister out for walks. I entered
on the most hurried explanations to my parents lest, if l became
too detailed and matter-of-fact, they might stop me with wiser
counsels. In Scout uniform, and with little more than a pound
to spare after paying my train fare, my rucsac crammed with
fruit and sandwiches and toilet things, I went off by train in
the expectation of finding bed and breakfast at a cheap board
ing house at the journey's end. The moment I began to walk
the streets of Margate in the hot August sun during the busiest
week-end of the year, I knew that it was not going to be as easy
as I had hoped. But I was too delighted with my freedom to
care: I had escaped from London, from adult criticism and
questioning, and was alone by the sea, with money to jingle in
my pocket. Nearly every place was booked up. Little placards
'No rooms' or 'No accommodation' faced me everywhere.
Those which were not ful l looked a little sourly and hesitantly
at a bare-kneed boy with only a haversack as luggage. The price
of others sent me blushing away. Within an hour or two of
arriving I decided that I would have to spend the two nights
of my holiday sleeping on the beach, and the thought of this
20

T H E BOY ON T H E BEACH

exhilarated me. Contentedly, I swam in the evening sea and

then drank a cup of tea at a booth while I ate some of the sand
wiches and buns mother had packed for me. I listened to the
pierrots and watched the girls emerging from bathing tents, and
looked round everywhere for a corner in which I might hide
and sleep, when the crowds went home, and I had the [retting
sea to myself.
And after darkness, when the lights were being dowsed in the
shooting galleries and cafes, and the hokey-pokey and Margate
rock stalls were being trundled noisily away for the night, I
noticed a boy whose aimless peering and wandering about the
sands appeared to be inspired by the same homelessness as
mine. The late-revelling gentlemen with faces like radishes, who
breathed a warm smell of stout through moustaches which had
the curve and sweep of cow-catchers, turned eventually for
home. The girls who swept in small, breathless eye-darting
packs along the front, with all the excitement of hounds on the
scent, went too. Those who were still about were visible only as
bare!y stirring scraps of pallor in alcoves and corners, and were
to be remarked only when the boys with them drew squeals
from them. They were up to no good. But the roaming boy
remained, hanging like myself over the promenade railings,
listening to the giggles and cries, and stirring and staring
angrily and fiercely at the source of them. Our intention to
spend the night on the beach was plain : it was that which made
me speak to him.
He had come down from London, he said. He had been
walking for several days. He thought he could get a seasonal
job in Margate. He couldn't remember how long he'd been on
the road, but he'd started in the Borough, where he lived. He
told me his address there, which I carried in my head for some
years, because of what transpired. He hadn't any money at all
now. I do not recall him well, except that he had an uncut
shock of greasy, tow-coloured hair, and was sullen and un
communicative, studying the pavement shamefacedly as he
talked. He had shabby long trousers which bagged as badly at
the knees as Charlie Chaplin's, and a worn jacket from the
sleeves of which his thin wrists poked. An unwashed smell
came from him.
The place and the meeting let loose all my powers of fantasy.
I imagined that he was a young criminal who bad run away
2I

THE BOY ON THE BEACH

from prison or reformatory. A succession of scenes played

themselves out in my head in which I saved him from a
life of unspecified crime and earned his lifelong devotion. At
the same time I shrewdly suspected that if it were daylight and
I saw him plain I should probably dislike him, and that we
might look ridiculous together, the lanky youth in Boy Scout
clothes, and the small boy in somebody else's east off lang
trousers. Yet with a glow of moral satisfaction I bought two fish
and chip suppers from a bar still apen, and gave ane to him.
W e sat on a bench overlooking the sea and ate them, and
stayed together for company, looking about the beach for a
warm and dry corner in which to sleep. We put two deck chairs
side by side and tried to sleep in them as we had seen the
elderly gentlemen do in the afternoon sun. But an attendant
drove us from them and we were forced to walk and talk again.
But beach attendants do not stay up all night, we discovered.
They have homes and suppers waiting for them. We had only
to wait lang enough, and watch the disappearing back of the
night constable on his beat along the front, to be certain of
privacy once more in the strangely empty and chilly night.
This time we did not dare to expose ourselves by sitting in
chairs in full view of the promenade. We laid two chairs flat
next to the official pile of them to serve as mattresses, and over
them caused others to Jean like a tent. Though they kept off
the dew and lessened the force of the breeze they could not
extinguish the thrilling mass of stars so dose above us that they
looked like a blazing city seen across dark water, the milky
way curving like the glowing main street through the heart of it.
The uncommunicative boy fell asleep almost immediately,
breathing steadily, like a relaxed and secure young animal.
Above the smell of paper, and cigarette stubs, and orange peel
and the sour and pissy smell of the soiled dry sand above the
tide limit, came the odour of his clothes and sweat. It reminded
me of a school classroom on a wet morning. Yet his presence
was exciting and disturbing in a manner I could hardly put a
name to, as though unexpectedly life promised illimitable and
even shady human encounters, as though the unexpected was
perhaps to be the most important element in my experience.
Not everything was to be mapped out beforehand for me, after
all. The powerful reformatory impulse which also worked in
me-the censorious attitude I had inherited from Scouts and
22

T H E BOY ON T H E B E A C H

Sunday School-made me anxious to begin as soon as possible

the reformation of the scamp at my side. In: the morning, I
decided, I would make him come swimming with me.
It was hot under our curious tent. When the wind dropped a
rank and greasy mist came out of the sea, obscuring everything.
I felt the beads of it wet my face and hair. The meal had
left a greasy aftermath in my mouth, and troubled my sleep.
The sand was ubiquitous. It flowed like water, trickling from
the canvas of the chair down my neck, gritting my lips and my
hair. When I fell asleep it was into the nightmare about that
terrifying passage in Oliver Twist where the innocent Oliver
is pursued by the mob through the alleys and lanes of London.
But this time I was one of the mob, thundering and shouting
with the rest, and the trampling of the incoming tide became
part of the swelling uproar.
When I woke the sun was just rising and trailing long
brocades across the wavetops visible beyond my feet. The dirty
beach had been cleaned and the sand was smooth and virginal.
The stained, used-up night had been replaced by the most
pure, unspotted morning. There was not a soul about: I un
dressed quickly, shivering in the delicious morning air, and put
on my bathing costume. I looked down at my strange companion
and thought of the business of his reformation, but now I did
not want the morning spoiled by his company . And anyway,
he was sleeping, his face buried in the crook of his elbow, his
tousled hair lightly dusted with sand. One grimy pink hand,
curled up like a baby's from the arm bent underneath him,
held a little pool of silver grains. I folded my clothes and
tiptoed out of the shelter and ran across the hard rippled sand,
bruising my feet. The sea was still far out, and when I looked
back I had difficulty in making out the tiny bivouac, for the
sea front of the town had risen up transfigured in the morning
sun, the hotels and boarding houses sparkling in the lavish
light, and every eastward window molten with fire; the sun
lit a tumult of cumulus above the town but the dead sand in
the corner where we had slept was still in shadow. Yet I thought
I saw a tow-thatched head peering across the sands at me in
astonishment, and waved before I waded and swam as far
out to sea as my strength would take me. The cold stung my
thin body, but the sea heaved and flashed in the glitter of that
immortal sun of which Jefferies wrote, and in this crystal world
23

T H E BOY ON T H E BEA C H

I felt my life vindicated, at last it was as alone and as pure as

I could make it.
When I ran back to the bivouac where my clothes were,
the boy had gone. I scrambled round clumsily for my glasses,
feeling blind and incapable without them in an emergency, and
peered about, guessing that he had gone round the corner to
the lavatory. I could not call out for him, because he had not
told me his name. Then I remembered my dream and a
certainty so frightening struck me that I felt like fainting. My
clothes had been tumbled. I dropped on my hands and knees
and felt in all my pockets. All my money had gone, with the
exception of half a crown he had missed in my hip. pocket
along with my return ticket. My anger was almost too great
physically to bear, it made me shake with so violent an ague
that I could neither dry myself nor dress. An early morning
passer-by, unshaven but rosy, a tradesman off to unlock his
stall, saw me shivering in this woebegone fashion and called
out, 'What, is it as cold as all that, kid?'
It was with difficulty I could speak, and in a cracked,
unnatural voice I managed to ask him if he had seen a boy,
because the boy had stolen all my money. 'Bleedin' 'ard luck,'
he said. 'What sorta boy? I seed a nipper runnin' up the road
jes now. I thought he was the paper boy. You'd hetter go to the
station.' But as, holding back my tears of rage, I contrived
somehow to dress, he whistled the first policeman who came
down the front and I had to tell my story all over again. I felt
a fool because I could not properly describe the thief. I had
been too shy to peer closely at him in the dark, and in the
light I had only seen him sleeping. I gave the police the address
in the Borough which he had given me and about which, even
the night before, I had had doubts. Several times that morning
I told my story to various policemen. And as I came haltingly
to a conclusion each one in turn seemed to stroke his mous
tache with the same gesture saying 'Ah, if you can't describe
him,' as if this failure of mine relieved them of any further
responsibility.
However, they took me up to a Boy Scout troop camping
on the cliffs and explained my plight and the Scouts invited
me to spend the rest of the week-end with them. I still had my
return ticket and half a crown, so that I did not need to send
home for money, and probably in the end I had a pleasanter
24

T H E B O Y ON T H E BE A C H

time than sleeping alone on the frowsty beach. But that happy
issue did not !essen my rage. Instead now of fantasies of re
formation, I indulged in fighting ones. I longed to meet the
boy in the street and thrash him. How, in my imagination, he
cried for mercy. This fantasy went on and on in my mind,
churning it up with so much hatred, that I grew sick of my
vile obsession and had to say to myself 'I must try to think of
other things and enjoy what holiday l've got left'. But I did not
succeed, and even when I returned to London I could not, for
many months, pass through the street in the Borough, in which
he told me he lived, without my heart beating rapidly, in the
hope that I should at last meet him face to face. Indeed the
thrashing fantasy only finally died when I realized suddenly,
long afterwards, that I probably should not recognize him
again.
While swimming with the hospitable London Scouts camped
at Margate I was stung in the forearm by some sea creature and
a hard lump, which it made me slightly sick to touch, came up
on my arm and obstinately resisted treatment. This unpleasant
ness, and the shock of having my money stolen, made me unwell
and I continued to grow more and more unwell after my return
home. One evening, meeting some friends in the street, and
wrestling with them I happened to bump my sore forearm and
sick and fainting had to sit down abruptly on the pavement.
My mother decided it was a boil, and began to poultice it.
Roly and the Scout troop were due home on the Saturday after
this incident, and I went to meet them, but all that day a
sense of sickness oppressed me, and when finally I came home
it was to crawl into bed, to begin immediately to vomit a black
and acrid bile. My tiny room stank with it: the family who came
to see me departed with alacrity. Mother was visiting relations,
and it was grandmother who had to struggle upstairs on her
gouty legs, and with creaking corsets, to bring me cups of tea I
could not drink. Nothing would stay down. A terrible pain
developed in the small of my back, as though an iron stake were
thrust into it on which I was compelled to revolve at an ever
increasing speed. My temperature rose and I became quietly
delirious and lost count of the days and where I was. For a long
time I continued like this until it was realized that I was
seriously ill, and the doctor was fetched. He could diagnose
nothing but gastralgia.

T H E B O Y ON T H E B EA C H

I rose up as from a death bed and with the first solid food I
ate suffered so swift a relapse that it was many weeks before I
had recovered sufficiently to go back to work. My young, baby
faced boss, Stilwell, who always sat with a spoon and a prophy
lactic bottle of Angiers' emulsion on his desk, gave one look at
me and said, 'Good God, boy, you look like a ghost! Are you
sure you're well enough to come back?' I was far from sure, as
a matter of fact, but hated staying at home with nothing to do,
a prey to the fear that I might lose my job.
I had become so nervous that I j umped at traffic noises
and train hooters, and was afraid even to cross the street. It
was while still in this physical state that a man fell on me out
of the sky. I was crossing London Bridge, after a late duty, in a
black drizzle which made the roads and pavements greasy
and the dusky evening murky, and sent the crowds hurrying
faster than usual to their trains. I half saw the accident from
the corner of my eye as I hurried along, insinuating my thin
body through the cracks which appeared in the moving wall
of people. The man was driving a beer dray from his regally
high seat above the road when the wheels of his cart locked
themselves with the wheels of another dray going in the
opposite direction. With a jarring and slithering, the heavy
drays ground to a standstill and the horses reared as in a circus,
while the driver, with outstretched arms, sailed calmly down
on me and sent me flying. I picked myself up, shocked but
unhurt, and looked for him. Hardly visible in the dark and
tumult he was crouching in the gutter, dose to the flashing
hooves, with his head between his hands. The old sack he was
wearing round his shoulders to keep off the rain made him look
like a bale which had dropped off a cart on to the sidewalk.
The grey city host thrust past him as though he were invisible.
If they saw him, they were pushed on by the impetus of the
homing multitudes behind them, and were gone before they
understood what they had seen. It developed into the kind of
nightmare in which one gesticulates to people to whom you
find you have become invisible. It was difficult to believe that
there was a man lying in the gutter, perhaps dead, who had
all but killed me too, and that people were rushing past him
without even seeing him. I thrust the people aside in a panic,
trying to shout something above the traffic's roar, and caught
hold of the driver by his shoulders. 'Are you all right?' I cried.
26

THE BOY ON THE BEACH

'Can you get up?' I tried to pull him up by his shoulders, but
he was a brewer's drayman, a member of a powerful race,
and it was as much as I could do to hold his head out of the
dung and slime. His face was bleeding and plastered with
mud, and with half-shut eyes, the unconscious head rolled in
my hands. I had to catch a man by the coat to make him
understand that there had been an accident and that he ought
to fetch a policeman. And I stood there helplessly, holding
the man by his shoulders from the fouled gutter, and essaying
to shove away with my shoulder the tremendous horses which
came nudging me in the back, seeking to nuzzle their fallen
master. The policeman helped to raise him and seat him on his
cart, which now stood innocently against the kerb, the steaming
horses quiet, while the dray with which it had collided had
lang since freed itself and vanished. And only when a second
policeman came, and a crowd began to gather in earnest
round the bloodied head, did I feel I could slip away and join
the stream for the London Bridge trains. I arrived home trying
hard to conceal the trembling which racked my whole frame.
Minor misfortunes continued. My Scoutmaster called to
ask me if I could swim for the troop in a local gala. 'But,' I
said, 'l've been ill, l'm still not fit-I get out of breath climbing
stairs even.' My friend Roly beamed encouragement. 'That's
just nerves, Les. You'll be as right as rain on the night.' And
specious appeals were made to my sportsmanship, my duty to
the troop, and to the importance of not letting the side down,
to all of which I was very vulnerable. 'Besides, if you won't
enter, there'll not be a single entry from the troop.' And so in
the end I found myself lining up in the local swimming bath
sick with excitement before the green, glittering water, for a
three length race against boys of my own age and, what
was worse, handicapped because of my past record. There was
not ane of them I could not have beaten two months befare,
but once in the water I knew I had no strength in me, and at
the end of the second lcngth, in a state of collapse, had to be
pulled out of the bath.
The Scoutmaster and my friend Roly were bland and con
soling. l'd been a sport to try, they said. But they did not meet
my eye, and there was an offhand and amused scorn in their
consolations, as though they'd found out finally what a poor
thing my boasted swimming prowess amounted to. I was toa
'27

THE BOY ON THE BEACH

to worry about this at first, but as my strength returned

l grew furious at having allowed myself to be persuaded to
swim . At the same time I was angry with Roly, who was my

feeble

friend, and who did not defend me, and would not meet my
eye. In silence we all went home. We stood by the pillar box
outside my house. The lamp post rose above us into the
bosom of the pl ane tree, and from the heart of the tree the light
exploded in all directions. Now, with a movement of leaves in
the wind, batwing patterns swung rapidly backwards and for
wards across the little group. Roly's silence made me feel so
betrayed and deserted that the tension was more than I could
bear. 'Why the hell don't same of you damn fools swim if
you're all that keen on prizes for the troop?' I blurted out .
They did not try to excuse themselves, but kept silent, and
Roly busied himself with his pipe. I could not see his face under
the shadow of his scout hat, but only two sinister pin-points of
light, like eyes, where the lamplight was reflected from his
pince-nez. 'A scout doesn't use bad language,' said the Seoul
master coldly. He was actually a draper's assistant, but I do
not suppose that he saw how insulting I was trying to be when
I exclaimed 'Oh God, oh Montreal,' and stamped off abruptly
without saluting. Not even Roly lingered, or came to have a
cup of cocoa by the kitchen fire. They all turned heavily and
went slowly away. As I undressed for bed it occurred to me
that Roly had probably been praising my swimming to every
one he could buttonhole for weeks past, and personally guaran
teeing that I should win the race for the troop, and felt badly
let down by my inability even to stay the course. About that
too I began to feel ashamed, for in the high summer at every
visit to the baths I had swum straight off at least twenty
lengths.
It was not very lang after this that Roly and I left the Scouts
for good. The influence of a new youth organization, with a
fantastic name-Kibbo Kift Kindred (Kibbo Kift was said
to mean 'the strong', or 'proof of great strength')-was power
ful on both of us. We debated whether we could in fact belong
to both organizations. It was a problem which weighed heavily
on o ur young consciences. The First World War was a receding
wave behind us, but we could never for lang farget that it
might return and ask again for the us eless valour of the young.
For Roly it had a more grievous significance than for me, for
28

T H E BOY O N T H E BE A C H

he had lost his elder brother at Ypres. It was necessary to

declare, we agreed, as passionately as we knew how, that we
were against war. If enough people had been of our mind in
1 9 14, we told each other, there would have been no war. The
conscientious objectors who had once been objects of scorn and
hatred now became for us the standard bearers of our own
idealism. We counted them heroes when we understood what
moral courage it must have taken to stand out against war in
the midst of the full tide of it, and to face persecution and
obloquy. We began, through Kibbo Kift, to meet men who
had been in prison for their convictions and admired them as
persons. Roly, who was eighteen, had recently become a troop
officer, and as such was entitled to go to meetings of local Scout
officials : at one such meeting he spake up courageously (but
also, I don't doubt, with the smiling perverseness which charac
terized all his actions) about the peace problem, saying that
Scouts ought to make an out-and-out declaration against war.
This incident gave rise to the conviction that we were both
'rebels', and our Scoutmaster hinted that we ought to resign.
And so we left together, to give all our attention to the Kibbo
Kift. We were full of sorrow at leaving a movement which
had claimed our affection and loyalty for eight or nine years
of boyhood, yet we were elated to have made a moral stand
together on so great an issue.
Roly must, nevertheless, have had some reservations about
this, quite unknown to me. It had long been my custom to
call on Roly every Sunday afternoon when we weren't hiking
or camping and to have tea and supper with him and his
family. We sang sentimental ballads like Juanita and Friend o'
Mine, while his mother played the piano for us; or we argued
interminably. Quite often we fell into heated argument with
his parents, who were elderly, retired actors. His father was a
slight, stooping, white-haired man, almost the double of the
George Arliss of the role of Disraeli, while his mother was a
larger and more round-faced version of Roly himself. She
smiled just as persistently. Just because they were old troupers
their interventions in an argument could be quite histrionic.
Roly's father was full of the unconsidered trifles he had snapped
up in his stage career. And once, when war and peace were
under discussion he put up his hand and cried, 'Stop ! Trifles
light as air are to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of
29

T H E BOY ON T H E BEA C H

holy writ! I suspect treason ! Nothing against the king! Uneasy

Iies the head that wears the crown !' Roly had once told me
that an actor ought always to hold his gesture long enough to
allow the audience to grasp it, and I could never farget this
when I listened to his father. I used to want to giggle when he
lifted his hand as dramatically as a policeman stopping
traffic and fixed me with a frozen stare only to have to interrupt,
and then reset, his gesture, after propping up his tumbling
pince-nez. But as Roly and his mother never giggled, but
watched in admiration, I had to stifle my impulse by gnawing
at my hand and turning my watering eyes away.
Unhappily, I was bidden at second-hand 'never to darken
his doors again'. John o' London's held an essay competition to
which I sent in an entry on 'Peace' modelled on J. M. Barrie's
address to the students of St. Andrew's on Courage, which I had
read and admired. The essay won no prize, but a rebuke
from Roly's father when I read it befare him. I spoke in it
somewhere of ' all the lives sacrificed for nothing in the Great
War', and Roly's father could not bear this, and when next
I met Roly he said, with an air of embarrassment, that I
couldn't come again, his father thought that what I had said
about lives sacrificed for nothing was an insult to his son who
had died fighting for his country. His life, his father had said,
was certainly not sacrificed for nothing.
I was silent with bewilderment, for I had not expected that
anything l'd written might be taken personally. I had supposed
that in a general way Roly's parents agreed with the things
which Roly and I asserted about the futility of war. But where,
in all this, did Roly stand? I was filled with resentment at
being made a whipping boy for both of us. 'But what about
you?' I asked hotly. 'What did he say to you? Doesn't your
Dad know that we agree?' Roly smiled his blandest and most
apologetic smile which stretched the big mouth which he
inherited from his grandmother round to his ears. He looked
as inscrutable as a Cheshire eat. 'Well, you know,' he said, with
a gesture of dissociation, 'it doesn't do to tell your parents
everything.' With that point of view in general I sympathized,
but in this delicate business had he led his parents to assume
that he shared their opinions? Perhaps in a way he did, perhaps
from my crudity and arrogance he had long ago privately
taken flight. I was beginning to understand how complex was
30

T H E B O Y ON T H E B E A C H

the character of one so openly and transparently my friend

as Roly. In him, too, I began to suspect the presence
of those deep wells of disapproval which had disconcerted
me in teachers, scoutmasters and others set in authority
over me.

CHAPTER TWO

A Y oung Cha p in Fleet Street

was becoming alarmed. My casually chosen job at the

Stores was beginning to look like life im
prisonment. I had entered a long, boring tunnel, with no day
light visible at the other end. My job would lead to nothing
except another job, a little more highly paid but hardly more
responsible, and the thought of this filled me with an un
controllable restlessness. At the end of ten years or so I might
become the kind of unpromotable senior clerk of which the
city was full, and remain in an obscure department, doing a
dull job, until I was called to my fathers. Just for this destiny
there seemed no point in being horn.
The smallness of my weekly wage exasperated me. My
eighteenth birthday was looming up and I was still earning no
more than 2 5 s. per week. Even by the standards of 1 923 the
prospect was a poor one. I decided therefore to apply for a
rise, and to leave if it was refused. But where to go when
I left?
My father's business attracted me, for it seemed to promise
an entry to journalism. He was an advertising manager, or
'space seiler', for a string of small provincial papers, with an
office in Fleet Street. His business was beginning to grow again
after the eclipse that it had suffered during the war and it
seemed more worthwhile to join him, as he wished, than to try
for employment elsewhere. When my application for a rise
was refused, I handed in my notice, and was very moved when
my three friendly and high-spirited office colleagues organized
a tea with 'birthday' cake on the day of my departure, and
presented me with a leather-bound volume of Leigh Hunt's

I International

32

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T

essays. I was the office junior, and they were not called upon so
much as to notice my departure.
My father's Fleet Street office was a back room up three
flights of noisy wooden stairs. It was piled high with racks and
files of newspapers which collected a grey pall of dust. A gas
fire with broken elements which softly popped and wheezed
warmed the room in which four of us had to work. On this
fire at four in the afternoon the typist brewed some syrupy tea
which was handed round in cracked cups. There was an
effiuvia of printer's ink, paper, tobacco smoke, orange peel and
dust. The electric light made opal the perpetua! tobacco haze.
The one grimy window let in a grey travesty of daylight. It
looked down on a court up and down which many times a day
boys with baggy flannel trousers and worn cardboard cases
passed to and from the printing school. The telephone rang
continually, but it was not always possible to hear through it:
my father's desk was so crowded that there was really no
room for the telephone. It perched on the directories and
was always falling on to the floor and getting smashed so badly
that it died on us.
The real king of the office was my father's partner, Pantlin.
Even when I first knew him he was white-haired and white
moustached like the Labour Leader, J. R. Clynes, even to the
carefully-groomed quiff. He threw up his hands in horror when
I told him so. From him came the odours of tobacco smoke and
orange peel. He lit his pipe when he came in and it remained
lit until he decided to eat the lunch he had brought with him
in his attache case. For this ritual he would spread the Daily
Express across his desk, and peel his apples and oranges upon it
and, as he took bites at his sandwiches, push his lunch from
side to side to expose the columns he wanted to read. When he
had exhausted page one he transferred his lunch and his eyes
to page two. The journey through the paper over, the stained
Daily Express was carefully folded and put in his case for his
wife to read when he got home, and the litter of orange peel
and apple cores swept with precision into the wastepaper
basket, there to scent aromatically the exhausted air. He made
indignant comments on life, sometimes difficult to understand
because they had to be made through bites of apple and
c;lattering plates of false teeth. 'Snowden ! l'd hang him if I had
the chance!' 'Everyone with any sense knows that strikers
c

33

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T

always inj ure themselves more than they hurt their employers.
l'd make it illegal to strike !' My socialist indignation was
easily aroused. But what irritated me most was that some time
during the afternoon he would advance the arguments of the
newspaper's leading article, as if he'd just thought them up
himself. I could never prevent myself saying rudely, 'You just
got that out of the Daily Express!' But this did not move him : he
could not see that it was a valid criticism. After all he read the
Daily Express in order to get hold of opinions he thought
sensible. And so he would lean enthusiastically across the table
and say, 'Well, seriously Leslie, don't you agree with me?
Every sensible man must.' I was baffied by this disarming
simplicity.
My father was somewhat afraid of Pantlin. Newspaper space
is not sold by sitting in offices. The representative must visit
advertising agencies, ingratiate himselfwith the men responsible
for handing out contracts, and build up the reputation of his
paper by optimistic accounts of the wealth and importance of
its readers. There was usually no exaggeration of circulation .
figures since these were the subject of audit by an independent
bureau. When you got to know a space-buyer well enough, you
took him out for a drink or a lunch and hoped that when
national schemes were launched for products which were house
hold names, the string of papers you represented would be
included on the list. My father was naturally good at these
personal contacts. He was handsome, with large, disarming
brown eyes, modest and friendly, and by a sound instinct never
overplayed his hand. So that he became 'Freddie' to everyone,
liked just for himself, and seldom forgotten when orders which
might come his way were hand ed out. The burden of bringing
in the business rested on his shoulders.
It was to Pantlin, during the time that my father was out,
that all the queries came. They mounted on scraps ofpaper and
the backs of old envelopes, on my father's side of the desk. And
when my father came in from his rounds to dictate the remain
der of his daily letters, there was Pantlin querulous with an
interminable list of queries.
Father hated making decisions : he was a moral coward who
would postpone making them until the last moment. He hated
saying 'no' to people, but often he hated saying 'yes' too.
Pantlin never let the queries rest. 'Did you decide about that
34

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E ET S T R E E T

solus position Saward Baker want?' he would ask. 'Ten shillings

is a mighty low rate for something we've always asked twenty
for.'
My father would give a nervous jump. 'Oh, that,' he would
say, looking gloomily down his nose.
'I only ask because Swansea keep on asking,' Pantlin would
say pointedly, frisking agitatedly the spears of his little white
moustachios.
My father would fuss irritably with his papers, and sigh
impatiently, and say 'I'll have to think about it,' clearly
intending not to, and hoping the subject would be dropped.
And Pantlin would shrug his shoulders irritably too; and into
the guilty silence that followed my father would hopefully
project any piece of good news that he had. The truth of the
matter probably was that in a moment of weakness father had
agreed to a cut rate of business and did not want to admit it.
lf pressed too hard about it he would edge gradually towards
the door and escape into the lavatory. A day or two later the
order from Saward Baker would come in with the rate column
filled in ' 1 os. per single column inch (as agreed with your
representative) . ' Pantlin would ask petulantly, 'Why didn't
you say you'd agreed it? Now what are we going to tell them?'
But father knew quite well what to tell them. lf it was a con
cession to an agent from whom we'd had a lot of business he
would say in his daily letter to the paper: 'This agent has looked
after us very well lately and I felt that we could afford this
concession. I shall be very glad of your approval .' lf, on the
other hand, it was to an agent who had given us very little he
would write : 'It has been difficult to get a footing with this
agency, which always favours the opposition paper. I feel that
a timely concession now will secure consideration for us in the
future. I hope you will agree.' They always did agree, because
the business continued to mount under my father's direction,
and everyone was benefiting from this, especially Pantlin.
Like my father, I was out of the office most of the day. I
called on agencies, pursued bad debts, took parcels to the rail
way stations to put them on trains, and walked every afternoon
round the city agencies which handled all the financial issues.
I n this way I lived for many hours every day in the apen,
excitedly exploring the city and the West End, arranging my
calls to take me through places it always refreshed me to visit35

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T

Lincoln's Inn, Gough Court, Fountain Court in the Temple,

the forecourt of the Guildhall, and windy sunset walks across
Rennie's Waterloo Bridge on winter afternoons. I would waste
time on city tours so that at sunset I should be walking down
Ludgate Hill, under the gunmetal railway bridge, and climbing
Fleet Street when westward the smoky London sky flared into
an apocalypse of purple and scarlet flame behind the black
lantern of St. Dunstans.
My abundant free time I spent in tea-shops drinking coffee
and scribbling bad poems, and programmes for youth move
ments, with equal facility. My determination to be a writer was
growing every day, and with the first commission I earned
from my father I bought myself a typewriter. A London Scout
paper of which I was a reader had just closed down. It had
adopted a critical tone and it was because of this that it had
ceased to exist: Imperial Headquarters had bought it up in
order to suppress it. Certain holder spirits who regretted its
extinction had come together and launched a new paper, The
Open Road, on a broader footing . I sent in an article to it upon
some open air topic and to my surprise and delight it was
printed. lndeed, the editor asked me to call and suggest other
topics that I might like to write about, and I made very great
haste to do so. No one mentioned any payment, but I was too
flattered to dream of raising so delicate a subject. But I do
recall that I was cunning enough to reply to the invitation to
call on the notepaper of one of the newspapers my father
represented. I felt that this gave me Fleet Street status.
When I arrived for my interview I found neither editor nor
manager in The Open Road office but a pleasant young man of
Jewish appearance who told me that he was a Scoutmaster, and
owned a business in the Hampstead Road, and was one of the
directors of the paper. The manager was ill and he had come
in at that moment to try to get a renewal of certain advertising.
He asked my advice. I looked at the contract he held out, and
as it was from an agency across the street from my father's
office I offered to call on my way back and have a word with
them. As to the articles, he entreated me to go on writing-'the
editor isn't full time and he'll be glad of anything you send.'
This all seemed so easy that I went away happy and excited
and called at the agency and secured, without trouble, a
renewal of the contract. The young man, to whom printing
36

A Y O U N G C H A P IN

FLEET STREET

and publishing were quite a mystcry, sounded, when I tele

phoned my success, quite awed by this proof of my influence.
When next I called, I found the young man that I had met,
whose namc turned out to be Boss, in conference with the
editor, a thin, tall, weather-beaten man who tied himself in to
knots in his chair and looked huntedly at me and rubbed his
chin, and looked away again. They were both rather dejected,
but Boss received me with friendly smiles, and immediately
began to sing my praises for my success with the advertising
contract. He then went on to tell me that they had that morning
been interviewing candidates for the post of manager: the old
manager had resigned. 'A rotten lot,' said Boss. 'Hopeless. '
I made polite remarks about their dilemma, remarking, with
some diffidence, that I supposed it would be as well if anyone
they appointed knew something about advertising as well as
printing, because a small paper could not hope to carry on
without it. It was the only thing I could think of to say.
'He's absolutely right, isn't he?' Boss asked the editor, who
nervously hastened to agree. 'I suppose you wouldn't like the
job, Paul? It probably wouldn't be worth your while.'
By an act of self-discipline worthy of a yogi I succeeded in
looking cairn, and even indifferent, and walked across and
frowned at the noisy trams shrieking, as they switched the
points in Vauxhall Bridge Road, like the damned in purgatory.
'Well,' I said, coldly, 'It rather depends on what you're paying.'
'I quite see,' said Boss in a depressed tone. 'But you're the
chap we want. You know all about advertising.'
'Not quite all,' I had to say, in a manner which modestly
intimated that what I did not know was not worth knowing,
and with a look which implied that I was open to an offer, and
as the three of us stared questioningly at each other it seemed
that the matter was settled, though what I was going to tell
my father when I got back to the office I did not know. I
inherited an office in Denison House as large as a boardroom
and my name was put on the door. My staff consisted of one
ruddy-faced office boy, with a fist like a farmer's, who with an
obsequiousness I found flattering, rushed to fetch up scuttles of
coal when the fire went down, and who called me 'Sir.'
It was part of my duty to act as Secretary to the Company
which ran the paper, and about this I knew more than I did
about the managerial side, for I had only j ust left the Secretary's
37

A Y O U N G C H A P IN FLEET STREET

office of the International Stores. I could hardly believe my

luck, and though my father grew testy when elated and
stammering I told him all about it, he gave other intimations
that he was privately proud, and perhaps astonished. My
friends were awed, and, with the badges of promotion thick
upon me, I was schoolboy enough to wish to visit my old
school and my old firm : it had hetter be soon, I decided, befare
my friend Boss discovered that I was not yet eighteen.
And now around me the London of Pimlico was spread for
my dissection 'Like a patient etherised upon a table', so that
I began with the nondescript and cosmopolitan area around
Victoria Station, and prowled farther and farther riverwards,
through streets shabby and furtive, or faded into poverty,
where the mists from the river curled around corners, and the
chrysanthemum maroons and yellows of the stucco peeled and
powdered on endless faades, and where one might still see
under the dripping sycamores of the old run-down squares

at the corner of the street

A lonely cab horse steams and stamps.
And then the fighting of the lamps.
It was possible to walk to the Tate in my lunch hour, passing
the romantic shipbreakers who displayed, in the lee of Vauxhall
Bridge, the figureheads of many an ancient ship of the line, or
to explore westwards to Kings Road and the proud Wren
palace of the Chelsea Pensioners looking down with dignity on
the broadening river. And once again here, as befare in Fleet
Street and Aldgate, my friends and followers began to gather
round and we would walk the streets in the evenings talking
about aur dreams and ambitions, and the girls we were going
out with, or hoped to, and looking for cafes where, for the price
of a coffee, we could argue for all the hours we chose to sta y.
Soon the editor of my paper resigned, and I took over his
duties, and hurriedly scouted around for textbooks on setting
up type and reading proofs. I tramped the agencies zealously
in search of advertising. I brought in an artist to design a new
cover, and with the spare time help of Boss and many of my
friends launched a publicity campaign to bring in new readers.
But I was not deceived : sooner or later The Open Road was going
to die. Thousands of copies of the first issues had been circulated
free to all the addresses which the directors had been able to get
g8

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T

together, and on its first issue the paper had claimed ten
thousand circulation, but once the returns from later issues
began to come in from the newsagents I could tell that we were
not going to hold even a three thousand circulation. By the
time the circulation had hit rock bottom, and even begun to
climb again, the capita! of the company had run out. Boss
failed to find new capita!, and I failed to sell the paper as a
going concern (with myself, if possible, as editor) , and in the
late autumn of 1923 the company went into voluntary liquida
tion and I was out ofwork. I do not recall that I was perturbed.
I had been prudent and saved about [5 0 of my salary which I
had put in the Post Office Savings Bank. With a little manage
ment, I thought, I could live on about two pounds a week and
write: my savings would last me six months and in that time I
should have earned more money. It was not possible to work
in the bedroom I shared at home with my brother. The house
was too full of noisy children, and it would have worried mother
to see me around all day long, so I took an unfurnished room
down the road for a weekly rent of five shillings. The room had
neither lino on the floor nor curtains at the window. Indeed,
one window pane was broken and let in a constant draught. I
stopped it with a rag. I furnished the room with a table and
some chairs bought for a song from the bankrupt Open Road and
with a small Valor heater, to keep me from freezing, sat down
to launch myself as a writer in a very passable imitation of the
poet's garret. There was in the house, unfortunately, a terrier
bitch who took an hysterical dislike to me. She lurked in the
hallway to hurl herselffiendishly at my trouser legs the moment
I appeared. Her unremitting attack quite often intimidated me
and I would walk the streets rather than face it, or, when
actually in my room would watch for an opportunity to escape
while the bitch was grubbing in the miserable back garden, and
fly down the stairs, and slip out and slam the front door, before
she realized that I was on the move. I would hear her behind
me rushing to the closed door, yelping her rage at my escape.
I wrote immediately, while the elation of freedom was upon
me, a book of essays which sought to recreate that atmosphere
of faded charm and wit which belongs especially to Elia. The
book did not turn out like that at all, but proved to be an
excursion into the pantheistic world of Richard Jefferies. The
Journal of a Sun Worshipper might, had it survived, have
39

A YOUNG C H A P I N FLEET STREET

ranked as one of the literary curiosities of adolescence. At the

same time I studied, as all the best hooks on 'How to 'Vrite'
taught me, 'the literary market'. I went to the Public Library
and noted down what things were being printed in the news
papers, and duly sent out my painful effusions modelled on
them, together, of course, with a stamped and addressed
envelope. They never failed to come back, unless I forgot to put
in the envelope.
A free-lance's life was a lonely one. 'Vho was there to care
whether I worked or what I did with my time? I missed the
friendships one made in offices and would have been miserable
in my isolation but for a friendship I formed with a secondhand
bookseller, Charles Watson, who ran his business as the hobby
of his years of retirement. When the land upon which our house
was built was 'developed' as a housing estate and straight
streets of suburban houses bearing fancy names like Gleneagles,
Balmoral, Windsor, Versailles and even-which was ours
Mafeking, spread under the wooded height of One Tree Hill,
the builders decided that they would establish a fine new
shopping centre so that we might enjoy the amenities of a town.
They set up an imposing parade of shops, with a lamp-post
every ten paces, to serve the local inhabitants who had moved
out of Deptford, Camberwell and Bermondsey into 'poverty,
pride and pianners.' But the parade was having a bad time in
my childhood : more than half the shops were empty: when the
air raids came they turned out most of the lamps and half of
them were never relit. Some of the shops were boarded up and
converted into villas. One empty shop we had used as our Boy
Scout headquarters for the duration of the war, and it was in
this very shop that Watson set up his business soon after the
Armistice. Befare the fireplace where we had roasted chestnuts,
and potatoes filched from local allotments, and told ghost
stories until our hair stood on end, he now sat repairing with
thin and sensitive fingers the secondhand fiddles he made a
hobby of collecting. I first met him when I was a schoolboy
badly in need of help. My school had held an elocution con test
for a prize presented by one of the governors. I had won it,
despite nervousness which made me fiuff some of my lines, by
reciting Hamlet's speech to the players. The prize was ten
shillings, and I was instructed by the head to go and buy what
ever book I wanted and to bring it for the governor to inscribe.
40

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T

But I arrived home that night to find the house in tumult and
no one at all interested in my triumph, for my brother had
collapsed in the city and been brought home very ill with
pneumonia. My mother was herself in a fever of anxiety for him
and worried, too, about money. 'When his temperature goes
down he is to have chicken broth and calves foot jelly and all
so1 ts of body-building things. However we're going to afford it,
I don't know.' Impulsively I pushed the ten shilling note into
her hand saying, 'Look mum, I won that, buy Ken something
with it,' and told her the story of the elocution prize. I cannot
recall what she bought, but in the end three shillings were left
for me. But when the head asked me whether I had bought
my book I was shaken by an acute attack of conscience. Could
I buy anything for three shillings which would look worth ten?
I dared not tell him how I had really spent the money: it would
never have occurred to me that he might be sympathetic, for
I did not imagine that teachers possessed any human feelings
at all. So I scoured Watson's new shop anxiously trying to find
a book, any old book, which would look like ten shillings and
cost but three. He watched my agitated and bespectacled peer
ing and probing, and then offered to help, and I poured out my
story to him. Eventually we chose something large, opulent and
worthless-Heroes of the Empire, or some such twaddle. Its value
to me was that it was expensively bound in calf with a school
crest on the cover and had once been the prize for a Victorian
schoolboy: with a safety-razor Watson skilfully cut out the tell
tale page of inscriptions, and with rubber and breadcrumbs
cleaned the whole thing up until it looked like a mint copy.
My headmaster raised his eyebrows at the sight of it, so
manifestly second-hand still, but asked no questions and duly
had it inscribed for me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, I
never read the book.
From that time I took to calling on Watson. He was tall and
lean, with a neat imperial and a patrician air, and a cocky
knowledgeability about everything under the sun. I was awed
to think it had been self-acquired. Like my own father, Watson
had begun life as a half-timer. In his youth he had worked as
an ostler in coach stables, and when horse-trams came on the
road he was accepted as a driver. He read Hyndman, Morris,
Kropotkin and Henry George by candlelight in poor East End
lodgings : in this he was following the path laid down for all
41

A YOUNG CHAP I N F LEET STREET

superior working-men in those days, and he was recognized by

his workmates as such. But he also read Plato, Herodotus,
Xenophon-in translation-and r 7 th century mystics and
platonists. So that his interests were rather wider than those of
other intelligent class-conscious working-men. He attended, in
his spirited way, the rise of trade unionism and the birth of the
Labour Party. He became founder-secretary of one of the early
Transport Unions, and by this path rose to a trade union post
of security and relative affiuence. Now he was retired, but his
respect for learning had grown with the years, and he strove
still to perfect it. John Bums, the self-taught man of the same
stamp who had risen to cabinet rank, had once been his friend.
With the same zeal that he read, he taught himself to play
the violin, and made a hobby of collecting old instruments.
There were aristocratic and Renaissance tastes in this trade
unionist which must have astonished his workmates, and now
here he was, my friend, an old pipe ever between his nicotine
stained teeth, running the shop as the hobby of his declining
years and hardly caring whether he got customers or not so long
as he could do what he wished in his own place. As I passed
down the street there was often the grasshopper stridency of a
fiddle coming from the shop parlour, or else there he was in
front, elegantly dusting the trays of twopennies with precise
gestures, and ready with a cheery wave of his multi-coloured
feather duster. I spent more hours browsing through his
shelves, reading a bit here and there, than I spent pennies on
the hooks he had to seil. But he did not appear to mind and
would send me home with hooks to read so long as I promised
not to keep them too Iong. In this way I came to read Esther
Waters, The .Nigger of the .Narcissus, The Voyage of the Beagle, The
Revolution in Tanner's Lane and many another masterpiece.
Among them, The Autobiography of Mark Rutheiford proved to be
a confession as poignant and revealing as that made by Richard
Jefferies in The Story of My Heart. But whereas The Story of My
Heart glowed with beauty and hopefulness, The Autobiography of
Mark Rutheiford was almost unqualified gloom and surrender.
It made my heart beat unbearably as I read the story of Mark
Rutherford's unhappy and poverty-stricken path to the minis
try of a poor dissenting chapel. I seemed to know the gloom
and hypocrisy of it all too well already. I became quite stricken
when I reached the chapter recording his meetings with the
42

A Y O U N G C H A P I N F L E E T STREET

atheistic compositor, Edward Gibbon Mardon, for I knew quite

well that he was about to take the road that I had trodden (as
I felt, bifore him) to unbelief. I wanted to warn him against this
smooth and ready-tongued man, who would so soon reveal to
him, in the friendliest possible manner, upon what slender
foundations he had built his whole belief in man and God.
How useless to pretend to feelings or intuitions in the face of
such censorious questioning! Why, a 'feeling' would not suffice
as proof of the existence of one's grandmother ! What use was
it to say that one had a feeling about God, or a sense of his
Presence, or that without him one's spirit wilted? That would
not do at all. Where was the material prorif, where was the
necessiry for God, was it not all, even the life of Christ, a myth?
And there, as my heart forebode, Mardon was presently saying
to this shy young hypochondriac, this second Malte Laurids
Brigge, whose apprehension oflife was as delicate and as tender
as a poet's, that 'the commonplaces which even the most free
thinking of U nitarians seem to consider as axiomatic, are to me
far from certain, and even unthinkable. For example, they are
always talking about the omnipotence of God. But power even
of the supremest kind necessarily implies an object-that is to
say, resistance. Without an object which resists it, it would be
a blank, and what then is the meaning of omnipotence? It is
not that it is merely inconceivable; it is nonsense, and so are
all these abstract, illimitable, self:.annihilative attributes of
which God is made up.' Presently Rutherford was reeling under
the sledge-hammer blows, 'stunned, bewildered, out of the
sphere of my own thoughts, and pained at the roughness with
which he treated what I had cherished'. His struggles, and even
his Iabours in London offices, seemed to be so close to my own
that for a long time I identified myself completely with him and
was full of an almost suicidal grief at his unhappiness, and even
now I cannot pick up this book without a renewal of my old
sorrow, which is at least a tribute to the almost forgotten genius
of Hale White. Another minor classic was The Journal of a
Disappointed Man by Barbellion, the very title of which repelled
me: I was quite unable to finish it, seeing sickness, death,
poverty and failure waiting in ambush for the unhappy young
diarist. I could not bear the thought that these were to be the
only rewards for such unremitting labour and masterful am
bition. Nor could I tolerate for one moment the presence of his
43

A YOUNG

CHAP

IN F L E E T STR E E T

despairing creed in my own life. I rebelled against so much maud

lin self-pity. O ne had to succeed at something: failure was a word
one ought not even to use. It was not until my thirties that I
could struggle through to the end of Ba1'bellion's confessions.
Charlie Watson might have helped me with my intellectual
and spiritual troubles, for he was a Swedenborgian, and that
meant that he must have faced, and answered, the questions
before which I was silent and helpless. But he did not: perhaps
because I was not articulate enough about them. Of course,
he had to be a Swedenborgian : it was an article of faith with
him to be different from everyone else. However, the presence
of so much Swedenborgiana on his shelves, with ti ties both dull
and abstruse, must have repelled many a would-be customer
prowling round for something that would not look too bad for a
birthday present, or hoping for a cheap edition of The History
of the Rod. He was always ready, without any provocation, to
expound the principles of the New Jerusalem Church, but when
he did so his character changed : he put on a chirpy, cockney
accent and held his head on one side in a defiant, sparrow-like
way, and my heart sank because I realized that he was on the
defensive and not truly confident of himself. This look of his
put him quite elsewhere-I could imagine him on the driving
seat of an old horse bus, a leather apron across his knees, crack
ing his whip at his horses and shouting abuse at the traffic.
He was never tired of recounting the story of the clairvoyance
of Swedenborg, which silenced me by its strangeness. Sweden
borg was at a dinner some two hundred miles from his home
in Stockholm. Suddenly he rose from the table, in a state of
agitation, declaring that there was a fire raging there. He
remained troubled for an hour or two, and then his anxiety
subsided and he explained to his friends, in answer to their
questions, that the fire had been extinguished befare it reached
his home. These events were confirmed in a day or two. From
what Watson told me Swedenborg began to appear to me to
be a kind of Jeremy Bentham-that is to say a scientist and
rationalist who made remarkable contributions to science,
but unlike Bentham experienced in his middle years a call to
serve God. He claimed to have spaken with God in his visions,
visiting both heaven and hell, and listening to the conversations
of angels. Armed with these Divine certainties he became a
Christian evangelist of immense power. What Watson told me
44

A YOUNG C H A P I N FLEET STREET

was confused : to my too pressing questions he replied cheerily :

"There it is, shelves full, read it yourself-you've got brains
enough !" and went on tamping his tobacco in his pipe. But
the immense volumes of dose black print, the philosophical
terms I could not understand, and the Latin tags I could not
translate, prevented me from doing more than flip the pages.
Besides I was repelled then, as always, by any suggestion
of the occult.
Round Watson gathered a small circle of young men all
struggling to carve out unusual careers. Roly, who occasionally
came, was destined to become theatre manager and astrologer,
Eric Greenhill, tall and thin, with wild Thespian locks, reached
the West End stage only to succumb to tuberculosis, and
Tommy Russell, who had been to school with my brother and
me, became viola player in the London Philharmonic and
eventually the secretary, then director, of the orchestra. He
has several good hooks to his credit, including the classic
Philharmonic, but in those days he was struggling desperately to
complete his musical education, and earned money by taking
pupils and playing the piano in the local cinema.
During the I 923 elections, while still striving to free-lance, I
went across to Tottenham to work as a canvasser in Percy
Alden's constituency. I was paid a nominal sum for this, I
remember, and learnt the election routine of addressing
envelopes and marking up registers and came to know well,
and for the first time, the rugged, idealist type of working-man
who, in those days formed the backbone of every constituency
Labour Party. One met the man who had suffered imprison
ment for his pacifism and who held in his face still the glow of
martyrdom, the Christian who had become socialist in order
to find a way of applying Christianity to society and who was a
lay-preacher for the local chapel, the harsh and scornful
materialist to whom everything was relentless struggle, with
the toughest coming out on top, and for whom this was an
excuse for a hatred derivcd from quite other sources, and the
intellectual school teacher, victimized for his political opinions,
whose devotion to 'the cause' did not exclude hope of a political
career. Their experience was so much greater than mine, and
they seemed so much firmer in outlook than the middle dass
leaders of the youth movements I knew, that I was much
drawn to them. They appeared to be an elite, and thought of
45

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T STRE E T

themselves as such, as self-taught men among untaught men

must always do.
One unorthodox piece of electioneering stands in my mind
still. Ellis and I were engaged on polling night on a wild
chase round to push all our supporters to the poll. We burst
in to the cottage of one party member who had obviously been
celebrating election day at the pub on the corner. He sat
befare his kitchen grate, in which no fire burned, stupidly
endeavouring to focus its saucepans in his swimming eyes. A
burly man, with beer-soaked moustaches, he reminded me of
the drayman who had fallen on me out of the sky.
'Well, comrade? Voted yet?' barked Ellis, as peremptory
as a drill sergeant. 'Only twenty minutes to dose of poll ! '
The man chuckled beerily and waved his arms like the
ftappers of a seal.
' Coursh, comrade,' he replied. 'Wooden led the Party down.
Why, I got me ruddy rescheipt ! ' And he fumbled in his
pockets and drew out his ballot paper to wave at us.
'Lord be with us,' said Ellis. ' Give me that here.'
He took the ballot paper, firmly marked a cross on it opposite
the name Alden and thrust it in to the hand of the drunken
comrade, clapped his hat on his head and thrust him to the
door.
'Wash all thish?' said the man. 'l tell you I voted, didden I?'
'Comrade, you're a bloody fool,' said Ellis, skilfully com
bining abuse of a drunk with respect for a party member.
'You haven't voted until that paper's in the ballot box. Get
off with you.' And taking him by the shoulders he propelled
him down the street. We watched him go, lurching happily,
trying to sing 'The Red Flag', and waving his ballot paper
at passers-by. The polling station was a school at the bottom
of the road and we saw him reach it. But we did not stay any
langer: it was best not to be in hailing distance when he made
his explanations.
On the night befare the poll our constituency and a neigh
bouring one held a joint rally in one of North London's
historie music halls, a vast, shabby place, with tier on tier
of dusty gilt plaster and rubbed red plush rising round the
proscenium arch. Plump and airborne cherubs, gold beneath
but grey above from the dust of ages, held aloft their ftambeaux
or emptied cornucopias upon us, a huge gilt and crystal
46

A YOUNG

CHAP

IN F L E E T S T R E E T

chandelier hung from the ceiling. Wc concealed a backdrop

of Piccadilly flower-girls and dandies with rows of red flags,
but with the safety curtain, which carried a patchwork of
lozenges advertising bicycle dealers and greengrocers, were
allowed to do nothing at all. I n the centre of the stage stood
the scarlet-covered table and the seats of speakers and support
ers. I was a platform steward and ushered Harold Laski, the
star turn, to his seat. At the sight of him the crowded theatre,
its temper revivalist, rose in applause. It was the first time
I had seen or heard him, though Ellis had told me that he was
a rising power in the Party, the darling of the intellectuals,
and a man whose books I ought to read. After a spate of
emotional oratory in which the faithful were summoned to a
last crusade against the heathen, Harold Laski got up to
speak. He looked like a boy, the brainy boy of the dass, small
and frail and well-brushed, with a high-domed forehead and
large, round horn-rimmed spectacles and a little Charlie
Chaplin moustache. He leant against the table and put his
hands in his pockets and without a single oratorical trick
began to talk to us in a quiet persuasive way, which contrasted
astonishingly with the tub-thumping which had preceded him.
What he gave us was a masterly exposition of a century of
social history in Britain, something quite unexpected by me.
I saw two things which I had until then only dimly grasped :
that there was an historical case for the socialism I had espoused,
not simply a moral and emotional one, which could be com
pellingly stated; and secondly, which was to have an influence
on my own intellectual development, that it was possible to
organize one's knowledge in an orderly and rational manner,
and present it logically and objectively, to people who neither
expected it nor particularly wanted it, and hold them. How I
longed to be able to do just what he had done that evening.
Yet I drew back from the thought that first I must begin
to study myself. I wanted to arrive at the scholarly end without
all the boring preparation.
Remembering my intellectual excitement on that occasion
I find myself seeking to understand how my mind worked then.
In my first novel (Fugitive Morning) , which was autobio
graphical, I wrote that the hero, whom I called Jim Penton,
used to think, not in words or concepts, but in a series of
pictures. Whatever he read or heard formed a cinematograph
47

A Y O U N G C H A P I N F L E E T STREET

film in his mind, and if it did not, he had no idea what it was
about. This intense visual quality so swamped my mind that
no abstraction could be comprehended unless it was attached
to a group of pictures. But my mind had its gratuitous visions,
too, conjured up by its own passions and fears. 'Pictures' is a
feeble noun for the exalting or Dantesque visions which
involuntarily spun themselves in my head. The visions were
not simply sexual ones (the realism of which was shattering)
but all which had to do with the misery and despair I now
divined in the world-slums, slum children, suburban
meanness, the pimps, the drabs and perverts, the berserk
savagery of war, the grinding mills of industry, and the total
futility of man's life-in a planet in which the human race, like
individual man, was doomed to extinction. How hard it was
to overcome this anguish of futility. To wake to face it day after
day, just to know that a senseless, sottish world went on, was
agony, and I stretched, like a drunkard to his bottle, for
anything which would lift me out of it. It was little enough
that was needed-a line of a poem, a sight of the sky from
the office window, the word or letter of a friend, or a song at a
meeting. My upward rush of exaltation would make me dizzy
with joy, but I was incapable of hanging on to it, and soon
plunged again into the blackest anger against the world. In
truth everything in the world so tormented me that I was
constantly on fire, constantly pounded by a visual bombard
ment, and had to hold my head in my hands for fear of losing
my sanity. If I write this now it is to try to explain to myself
(for I still reproach myself for neglected opportunities) how
such mental instability completely unfitted me for the
systematic learning which I knew I would have to undertake
one day.
Ellis had explained to me that Laski was a Jew: I had
looked therefore for something Jewish about him to mark his
membership of the strange and brilliant race of which so many
exotic members were to be seen around Aldgate-the flashy
gentlemen at shop doors, the eastern Jews in greasy high caps,
caftans and side-curls, and the glowing oriental beauties : but
there was nothing Jewish about him, as far as I could see,
unless it was something compelling and even harsh in a voice
which seemed astonishing in one so slight ofstature.
The Labour Party won enough seats at this General Election
48

A Y O U N G C H A P IN F L E E T S T R E E T
to become the !argest party in the House: with Liberal support
it formed the Government, to the fury of my father's partner
Pantlin, who talked of emigrating. A victory reception was
held, by the Trade Union Club, I think, to which Ellis took
me as his guest. I remember little about it now except that,
to my horror, the expensive tweed suit I had bought when I
was employed by The Open Road was becoming as wide in
mesh as a fishing net over my white knees. I had to be most
careful not to sit down in public. I was introduced to that
spectacular politician, James Ramsay MacDonald. Standing a
little forward from the future members of his cabinet, at the
head of some steps, he received the guests. The respectful
inclination of his lieutenants to the organizer of victory-many
of them owed their seats to his tremendous oratory-was most
impressive. It was the kind of thing one saw on news-reels.
MacDonald had a special word and handshake for Ellis, who
had been at his side in the famous battle of Woolwich Common
when Arsenal workers drove the supporters of 'Pacifist'
MacDonald away with stones. It was Ellis who introduced me,
and I moved forward to a gracious handshake. MacDonald
glowed there, happy in victory, the most handsame man I
had ever seen in my life, quite conscious of his own saintly
beauty under his leonine, greying hair and ardent neuropathic
brown eyes. Byzantine paintings always made important
personages large and the lesser ones small. MacDonald's
magnetism did this of itself: he dwarfed everyone else. Where
ever he moved in the room he created this remarkable aura.
No one was more conscious that night than he that with
him a new era in British politics began. This magnetism
explained his ascendancy over the Labour Party of those days :
it needed a great man of its own as a couuterpoise to the
procession of illustrious figures produced by the Tory and
Liberal Parties for over a century. MacDonald looked just that
great man the party needed, standing unafraid under the
lamps of destiny. The only other man in whom I had met this
consciousness of greatness was John Hargrave. And he also was
mistaken.

49

C H A PT E R T H R E E

'Oh Y oung Men

'

he youth movements rejected the world which burnt us up

with despair. At least, that is one way to explain their
hold upon us. But, so long ago, it was more than rejection. It
was the positive call to brotherhood we heard also, a summons
to those astonishing freedoms we demanded in defiance of the
tabus of another generation : a spirit almost universal in the
' twenties. Stephen Spender spoke for us--

Oh comrades step beautifully from the solid wall

advance to rebuild, and sleep with friend on hill
advance to rebel . . .
I lost my soul to movements when I was quite a tiny boy. It
seemed a very fine thing to me to be one of a gang. At five
years I boasted lyingly to my friends that I was the mascot of
the Scouts and marched in front of their band every Sunday.
And at eight or nine years I proudly walked the streets wearing
my little green Wolf Cub hat, and a bright scarf round the
neck of my grey jersey. I had waited with a grand impatience
for the day. The roughness and the raw smell of the stiff new
jersey, and the silky caress of the scarf round my neck remain
unforgettable. I can recall my indignation that I was not,
like my brother who was a Scout, permitted to wear a new
leather belt, the colour of a ripe horse-chestnut and smelling
wonderfully of tannin. The Cubs met in the loft over a stable,
clambering up the hollow-sounding stairs to reach a romantic
room lit only with storm lanterns where we sat on the floor
and learnt to tie knots. There was about it the smell of hay and
horse-dung, and harness leather, and from under the floor
50

' oH Y OUNG MEN O H Y O UN G C O M R A D E S '

came the champing and stamping of the bakers' horses.
Through the cracks between the floor boards we could feel
their warm breath ascending, and look down and catch
glimpses of polished coats and rolling eyes.
Every Sunday we formed up in military order in the cobbled
stable yard behind our waving flags and led by a thrilling
drum and bugle band marched off to church. The Boy Scout
movement was so new in those days that we were fair game.
Crowds would follow the marching troop : not always friendly
ones, and often, to march out of the stable yard, we had to
push through a mob of spitting and jeering youths from the
nearby slum streets. They had a song about us which began

'Here come the Brussel Sprouts

The stinking, blinking louts'
and we were often told to 'Go 'ome and wash yer knees !'-for
bare knees, rare among children in 1 9 1 2 and 1 9 1 3, constituted
in their eyes almost an indecency. My brother was the first
boy to display bare knees at our council school and took the
mockery which followed with a stoical cairn I much admired.
Presently, of course, I yearned to play in the band, and as a
Wolf Cub I stepped along whistling away at my fife, and later
graduated, as a Boy Scout, to a side drum. Nothing I d id
elsewhere, in school or in church, ever brought me the same
pride as my achievements in Scouting. It was the only social
organization interested in taking me into the country, and
through it I made long forays, running and walking, as part of
a trek-cart team which ranged far and wide through Kentish
!anes. We spent days by the Ravensbourne, cooking, learning
to light fires, swimming and playing games : through the
Scouts I expanded my own personality and discovered in
myself natura! powers ofleadership over other boys.
I recall all this now as part of the effort I am constantly
compelled to make to estimate the power and influence of
youth movements in this century. It is curious what can be
overlooked by historians and sociologists. Search through the
library shelves and you will find endless volumes on the
theory and practice of socialism, on trade unionism, and on
every aspect of child welfare and education. But you will find
almost nothing about youth movements, except the occasional
volurne of instruction or propaganda. Yet if we are thinking
51

'

o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S '
of the real social revolution of our century, that is to say, not
so much the rise and fall of standards of living, but the most
significant changes in behaviour-clothing, sex relations, hobbies,
sports and holidays-then we have to admit that the youth
movements have been the most successful revolutionaries of the
lot. But you will hunt high and low for an authoritative work
which takes notice of this phenomenon. Because the apologetics
of youth movements are callow, their arguments crude, and
their practices puerile, they are dismissed or ignored by
scholars. But one has only to turn to the history of German
youth movements to see that these faults of adolescence in no
way minimize their social and historical importance. In Punch
of I g I 5 Frank Reynolds drew a cartoon of a Prussian household
engaged in its morning hate of Britain. It is a memorable
drawing, for it reveals with masterly lines the stuffiness of the
household, the curtains concealing nine tenths of the windows,
the drapes everywhere, the table cloth carried down to the
floor to conceal the legs of the table, the family ridiculously
overdressed from the tiny boy with long curls and a fauntleroy
suit to the fat, bourgeois father. It was hardly a caricature, but
the living truth about the overfed and overcushioned life of
the German bourgeoisie of those days. G. R. Halkett describes
in The Dear Monster how one day he, child of a respectable
and cloistered family in Weimar, walked into the woods, and
stumbled upon a bunch of boys camping. They had bare
knees. Their shirt collars were open and they wore no ties.
They were playing guitars round a campfire. 'It was far
too fantastic to be true. It was violence to at least half a dozen
basic "not dones". I had never seen anything like it.' These
boys, despised and feared by bourgeois parents as a runaway,
gipsy kind of youth, turned out to be more friendly, interesting
and even more moral than the decadent schools he attended,
where on the surface everything was as it should be, but
underneath cruelty and evil were rife. But if one saw the
German bourgeoisie between the wars it was to discover that they
had adopted the codes of the once-despised Wandervogel. A
whole nation had taken to hiking, sunbathing, the wearing of
shorts and the search for a simple and unconventional life !
The real revolution in standards of personal conduct was
accomplished by the youth movement, and in our own country
too. This search for a new form for life had in Germany
52

o H Y O U N G MEN O H Y O U N G C O MR A D E S '
political consequences of the utmast importance for the whole
world, for Adolf Hitler was 'one of them', and his movement
the apotheosis of the revolt of German youth.
In Britain, though everything was much more sober and
down to earth, when Sir Robert Baden-Powell began to
publish serially his Scouting for Boys British youth by the
thousands were electrified. With an astonishing perception
they leapt at Scouting as at something for which they had long
been waiting, divining that this was a movement which took
the side of the natura!, inquisitive, adventuring boy against
the repressive schoolmaster, the moralizing parson and the
coddling parent. Befare the leaders knew what was happening
groups were springing up spontaneously and everywhere
hands of boys, with bare knees, and armed with broomsticks,
began foraging through the countryside. But for that general
ship of which Baden-Powell was a master, the Boy Scout
movement might have led to the defiant experiments charac
teristic of German youth: as it was, under his leadership it
became orderly, constitutional and imperialist and, as Gilbert
Armitage wrote,
'

'the roar heard in Mafeking

is muted to a pious wheeze
of sound advice on life and string
to little brats with naked knees.'
In those days there were no cinemas, no radio, far too few
playing-fields, and schools were still centres of tyrannical
cane-lifting oppression. The Scout movement was the very
breath of hope and love and encouragement to many a child.
In the decade from I go8 to I g I 8 no other inftuence upon
British boyhood came anywhere near it. In this decade I grew
up, with the Scout movement as my real spiritual home,
learning to despise the work of classrooms in favour of the open
air pursuits the Scout movement glorified, and hopeful that
I might build my whole life upon them. In the war years, when
the determination of the boys themselves saved hundreds of
Scout troops from collapse, a new voice emerged in the mave
ment: it came from the author of many vividly-illustrated
articles on camping, woodcraft and Red lndianism. The author
called himself 'White Fox' ; enchanted, I cut out the articles
that he wrote in the weekly paper called The Scout and
53

'

O H Y O U N G M E N O H Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

pasted them in a scrapbook. 'White Fox' was John Hargrave,

and even when I was only eleven or twelve he began to exercise
an influence on my thinking. He was a typical Scout ' hero' ;
a magical, charismatic aura surrounded him.
There was behind him, to begin with, a romantic war
record as stretcher bearer and war artist at Gallipoli. His hooks
and articles, with their bold line drawings, and intense, poetica!
preaching of an open air creed, had created in the Scout
movement, which lacked little in imaginative appeal to begin
with, an atmosphere of wild and contagious hope among the
boldest spirits. He spoke espedally to those millions of young
men who, like myself, had grown up since earliest childhood
in the Scout movement from which we had absorbed hopes and
dreams about life our parents could not have understood.
Hargrave's postwar book, The Great War Brings it Home, carried
the teaching of scouting to the stage we all unconsciously
longed for: it promised to make the doctrines and way of life
of the youth movements the basis of our entire existence. So
completely, immediately after the war, was the Scout
movement becoming stamped with the personality of John
Hargrave, that we regarded him as the natura! successor to
Baden-Powell, a view the Scout movement seemed itself to
acknowledge when it appointed him Headquarters Com
missioner for Camping and Woodcraft.
This leader had a powerful personal magnetism. I recall
him in those days as tall, with sharp, almost Romany features,
an aquiline nose, and a mass of wavy black hair. We were
none of us certain of ourselves : we were restless, dissatisfied
and unhappy, and full of an aching longing for a more
purposeful life, and Hargrave always spoke as though possessed
of an absolute and even insolent certainty of where he was
going and what he was doing. That carried immense re
assurance with it. I was even a little fearful of his power over
me when he fixed me with his dark, compelling, ironical eyes.
I was not alone in this. Men far older and more experienced
than I acknowledged his genius and treasured up his eloquent
letters as if they were a new Holy Writ. Those associated
with the birth of the new movement he was to found were
people of the stamp of Henry Nevinson and the Pethick
Lawrences (at whose house in Lincoln's Inn the new mave
ment was horn) : to his side flocked many of the experimental
54

'

O H Y OUNG

MEN

OH

Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

educationalists, those who, through the New Educational

Fellowship, have since had so much influence on the new
pedagogy.
In the Scout movement, with its millions of impressionable
boys and young men, organized on a world-wide basis,
Hargrave's future had seemed utterly assured. Yet he chose to
break with it, on the two issues that troubled the conscience
of all of us, war and democracy. There was, in the Scout
movement in those days, no means by which the rank-and-file
could influence the policy or change the leadership of the
movement. And on the issue of militarism, the pre-war record
of the Scout movement was not a very happy one. It was
because Hargrave demanded reforms in these matters,
including a more democratic constitution, that he was expelled.
And when he launched his new movement, Kibbo Kift, or the
'Proof of Great Strength', its declaration of aims, called 'The
Covenant of the Kibbo Kift', was like a new wind blowing
through our young country. Under the influence of H. G.
Wells, it spake strongly for peace, world unity and world
government: from Wells too came the conception of a New
Samurai which inspired it. The Covenant asked for co-operative
woodland communities and the revival of native arts and
crafts, the restoration of rural industries and the renewal,
through a new education on woodcraft lines, of the old folk
life of the people, now buried under a machine-made
civilization. Like Edward Carpenter, we looked upon
civilization as a disease our new movement was to cure : if we
visualized a new society it must have approximated to that
which William Morris describes in News from Nowhere. The
advocacy of Craft Guilds gave encouragement to the socialist
elements in the new movement. The demand for land
reservations and national parks breathed the hope of salvation
from endless urbanization. And there was, above all, the
direct and unforgettable command to members to seek pride
of body, balance of mind and vital spiritual perception. In
those days of hope we were carried away.
Hargrave brought his sense of form to bear upon the costume
and practices of the Kibbo Kift. We dressed in cowled jerkins
and wore shorts. Our leather beits were handmade, our badges
hand-decorated and Hargrave's own excellent designs saved
us from the inept and banal. Vve loaded our gear into handsame
55

'oH

YOUNG MEN O H YOUNG C OMRADES

'

rucsacs and tramped with rough ash staves in hand. The

simple, archaic monkish costume seemed itself to witness to the
rougher, more self-reliant, yet more brotherly life we were
going to pursue with a religious devotion. The development of
a campfire ritual of extraordinary splendour-the celebrants
of this strange mass wore embroidered robes, and intoned
a liturgy to the swinging of censers as they lighted the
ceremonial fire-promised the birth of a n e w, pagan religion.
We were certain that we were the new elite, and that by
some mystical process we had been chosen to transform the
world.
My exhilarating promotion to be chief of a paper devoted to
'Rovering, camping and woodcraft' gave me a professional
interest in youth movements, as well as acquaintance with
many youth leaders. The life of youth movements I conceived
to be my true business, to which even my writing had to take
second place, and all my spare time was spent at the camps
and gatherings of the lodges. I had founded my own youth
lodge, of which Roly, and Eric Greenhill, the actor, were
the principal members. Gordon Ellis, who then lived in Dept
ford, put up the idea that we should bring together all the
scattered members of John Hargrave's movement in South
East London and form them into a local association. The
first meeting was held in the mayor's parlour at Deptford
Town Hall and among those present were John Wilmot, who
had unsuccessfully contested East Lewisham as a Labour
candidate and so fired the opening shots of his political career,
Joseph Reeves, who was running Co-operative education
locally, a man of intense energy and imagination, and many
others prominent in South London socialism. To my surprise I
was appointed leader, an honour I tried to refuse and hardly
knew how to sustain. By a series of mischances this quite
premature promotion of mine was to be the cause of a serious
split in Kibbo Kift, which had the consequence of destroying
it.
This election took place about the time that I took over
The Open Road: it was about then, too, that I went with friends
to visit John Hargrave in his little bungalow at Kings Langley.
We pitched our one-man tents in the waste land behind his
bungalow and came in, when summoned, to sit at his feet and
listen to his omniscient talk.

'

o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

The romantic gear of the artist was everywhere about:

across the distempered walls light murals had been sketched.
Hung on the walls were same paintings which made ane want
to see more of this aspect of his life and work. One, if my
recollection serves me well, in blue and grey washes, showed a
minute caravan of Neanderthal men and women, carrying
their babes and all their worldly goods on their backs, crawling
eternally on through a downpour of rains as unceasing as in
the days of the Flood. It was entitled 'Hell'. There were little
models which he had made-or perhaps collected-of the
dogheaded God Anubis which Hargrave seemed to regard as a
personal symbol-his name in the movement (where no ane
was ever Bill Smith or Jack Jones, but Red Eagle or Grey
Beaver or same such absurdity) was 'White Fax'. They were
fascinating but they made me uneasy. They reminded me that
there was in the new movement a credulous wing ready to
tinker with the occult. Perhaps it owed its presence to the
many theosophists who were associated with its birth, but I
felt then the absurdity of this servant girl stuff in a rugged,
apen air movement.
It was on this occasion, I think, that we played the night
game. We trooped excitedly into a hanging wood of birch and
oak, and divided into teams, and sought in the inky blackness
to attack each other's bases. It was like the schoolboy game of
'Release' played at night with the aid of torches. We lay under
bushes and held aur breaths to listen for the movements of the
enemy. Only the night wind was audible, groaning through the
wood, and brushing the tree-tops through the stars. It was
thrilling to lie silent with the damp cold earth beneath ane,
the smell of dew and rotting leaf mould in one's nostrils
invisible and inaudible ane hoped, yet conscious of the urgent
and noisy beating of one's heart. I recall the frightened sense
of the primeval Hertfordshire forest of oaks and undergrowth
where on any such night as this thousands of years aga the
silence which first hurt the ear drums must have been followed
by just such a crashing and crying of heavy beasts in the
undergrowth. I turned over to spare myself what I might be
about to imagine and stared up at the gibbet swaying of the
trees, and felt myself tremble.
We gathered in a file, summoned by the imperious winking
of a leader's torch and each man felt for the next man's ankle.
57

'

OH YOUNG MEN

OH YOUNG

C O M RADES

'

The leader had found a gully through the defences, he said,

and we moved off, a blundering python, each one of us
privately certain that we were audible for miles away. The
night expresses of the Great Northern hooted above the owls,
and we moved faster during their thundering. But the gully
was a snare the defenders knew of old, and as we rested in it,
listening to our own breathing, an ambush rose around us,
and we leapt up with prickling scalps and skins to defend
ourselves. It was each man for himself now and when my
panic thrust had taken me through yielding jerseyed bodies
I found myself quite alone, as still as a tree or a stone, with the
shouting and calling dying away from me. The glimmering
torches were flying still in all directions, in graceful curves,
Eghted and then obscured, like darting fireflies. And as the
night wind blew fragrant from the spring meadows it was like
Greece, I thought, with the torches of the priestly rabble
scouring through a wood on the slopes of Mount Hymettus
to a dawn ceremony. It is now, I thought, that they should sing
one of Hargrave's litanies.
I pushed my way through bushes, my jersey drenched with
their burden of dew, and came to the edge of a wood. Where
was I? I crawled gingerly through barbed wire to the field
beyond to see if there was a footpath. The field was ploughed
and, too tired to cross it, I sat down on the grass bank and
searched for my pipe, happy to find it unbroken. As I sat
smoking contentedly the gibbous moon came up over a still
more distant wood, throwing a pale glint on the roofs of Kings
Langley village and picking out for me my road home. I
walked back dreaming of the cosiness of my kapok sleeping
bag: but sleep was not permitted yet, for my comrades had
returned befare me and someone had brewed coffee and we
sat by the campfire, our faces ruddy and disembodied in its
flicker, and boasted of our exploits.
It must have been at this first meeting that Hargrave
learnt that I was not yet eighteen and looked slyly down at me
and rubbed his nase. To join the movement at all as an adult
one needed to be eighteen and I, by a subterfuge on the
matter of age, had already two years' membership behind me l
My election to leadership of the South London groups was
therefore rather irregular. And even though it was the task of
the movement to encourage youth and to condone rather
58

'

o H Y O U N G MEN O H YOUNG COMRADES '

than oppose my precocity, Hargrave chose to make this a
point on which to refuse to recognize the new South London
association. He had other points, of little importance now. All
this launched an acrimonious correspondence between Har
grave and me and stirred up a fierce debate between the
leaders of South London groups and the stalwarts who stood
around Hargrave. The issue, ultimately, became very much
simplified. It was whether Hargrave had the power to override
the decisions of a local association : Hargrave's belief that he
had was exaggeratedly described by the rest of us as a wish for
personal dictatorship. At the picturesque apen air assembly,
which was called Althing, organized in 1 924, the South London
groups moved a vote of censure against him We sat in a
circle in the open air while the debate droned on. It rained
and we adjourned to a barn where the rats squealed in the
bales of straw. We returned to the apen air for the dramatic
moment of the vote. By a small majority it went against us.
The dissident groups were seated together like an opposition
party in a Parliament, and when the figures were announced
by the heralds, their real leader Gordon Ellis (for I was no
more than a figurehead) announced their intention to resign
from the movement, and one third of the circle of jerkin-clad
youth rose together and ceremonially withdrew.
Hargrave was left triumphant in the midst of his loyalists.
It must have been a barren victory for him. Movements do not
easily survive the shock of breaking into two a few years after
their foundation : the remnants always grow embittered. The
groups which had resigned commanded the confidence of the
Labour and Co-operative movements and they alone were
capable of bringing the vast resources of working-class move
ments to the aid of Kibbo Kift. By the loss of them, Hargrave
had forfeited for ever the chance of building his movement
into a powerful and independent 'Left Scout Movement'. But
perhaps this was what he dreaded most of all ! Looking back
I find it difficult to conceive that the dispute was about so
trivi al and dreary a matter as the election of a leader to a local
association in the face of Hargrave's disapproval. The truth
was that the two wings of the movement were inspired by
different social philosophies. And to become the leader of an
organization increasingly dominated by the aggressively
minded socialists may have been the last thing Hargrave
59

' o H YOUNG MEN O H YOUNG C OMRADES '

wanted. Romantic and individualist in temper, he tmncd ,
by an instinct which perhaps was more sound than we then
thought it, from any demand for the creation of a mass move
ment. Yet he never found what he wanted, and after we left it,
Kibbo Kift passed through many curious transformations,
reaching in the end the role of a uniformed avant-garde of
Social Credit by way of more than one phase ofbucolic rusticity
during which the Kin gathered annually for the ceremonial
roasting of an ox over a campfire.
I find it difficult to criticize Hargrave now as I did in the
days of my callowness. It would have been a good thing to
have seen his movement develop without the fatal eruption of
my personality into it. Raving in my turn failed just as dismally
to build a 'Labour Scout Movement' after years of effort just
as intense, I cannot blame him for deciding in advance that it
was not worth trying. One loss to both wings, Hargrave's and
the opposition, impossible now to estimate, is that certain of the
more experienced and brilliant recruits which Kibbo Kift had
made, who had seen in it the new wind of youth and candour
which Europe wanted, ceased to have any more interest in the
whole business. They passed on to other interests and res
ponsibilities and left us to our impassioned puerilities.
I quite saw that nothing had been gained by our collective
resignation if the dissident working-class groups were going
to fall to pieces and disappear. What was needed was this
'Labour Scout Movement' which Hargrave had failed to
launch. But the rebel groups had tasted anarchy: they wanted
to be left alone to do as they pleased. Why should they be
burdened with constitutions and subscriptions when all that
was necessary was to sling your rucsac on your back on Saturday
and, with the boys and girls who were your comrades, make
tracks for the countryside? Besidcs, who would accept the
burden of leading the new organization? The old leaders were
too busy: their careers el ai med them. And the talks we had in
Peckham or Poplar came to nothing.
Roly went off and formed a group which met in the
Walworth Road. He came to me to show me the elaborate
educational programme he had worked out for it, of which the
guiding principle was that you had to train the child so that it
no longer felt inferior in face of the adult world. Roly had
worked out the 'recapitulation' theory to its logical conclusions.
6o

' o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S '
This was a theory which the youth movements of the day owed
to the American, Stanley Hall, whose book Adolescence had had
a great vogue. The recapitulation theory advanced in it
justified the pursuit of the primitive which scouting and
woodcraft movements displayed. The child, it was argued,
passed through phases of activity in growing up which were a
recapitulation of eras in the evolution of the race. When
children light fires in the woods and make themselves bows
and arrows, they are working through a hunting period ofman's
evolution. The mania for collecting, whether foreign stamps or
birds' eggs, belongs to the beginning of the acquisitive civil
izations. Hall even postulates, I think, a certain period in a
boy's life when he wants to play at 'working in offices' and
'swapping' things which is said to correspond with the
commercial p hase of modem society. If, we bel!eved, the child
were not allowed this natura! progress from primitive innocence
to civilized sophistication, then he was liable to be 'arrested'
in a primitive state.
Ro!y argued that we failed to use this theory proper!y if we
left the boy still in the primitive stage at fourteen and fifteen :
the most important thing was to bridge the gap between the
boy-savage and civilized man, and this was on!y possible if the
boy recapitulated everything. He had to get the thrill and
danger of modem war by lying in wet trenches and throwing
stones at opposing gangs : he had to be permitted to smoke and
drink, and to acquire poise by leaming to dance and getting
to know girls in a social way. I replied that you could go too
far, and that if the boy was going to be allowed to do everything
that an adult did, then there would be nothing new for him
to do when he did become adult. And in any case, I asked,
where do you draw the line? There's sex, I mean, I said.
Roly was rather huffed by my scepticism and went off to work
out his elaborate scheme single-handed among the boys of the
Walworth Road, one of whom, he was always fond of telling
me, suffered from dementia praecox, and could be quite
dangerous with an axe.
Yet though I scoffed at Roly's unpracticality, I shared the
passion that moved him. We were both really legislating for
ourselves. We felt we had been injured by the process of
growing up, and that life had become disfigured for us because
of its emotional, sexual and economic miseries. How easy it
61

o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S '
was for others, too, to make a blind recoil from maturity because
of them ! We felt the burden of a duty to end this intolerable
thing, and it was this which made us read and theorize about
pedagogics. Somehow, somewhere it ought to be possible to
find a way of growing up gracefully.
I came to the conclusion that no effort would be made to
establish the new youth movement unless I made it myself.
However, I was only nineteen, and I first had to demonstrate
to myself that I was capable of doing what I wantcd. There
was a thoughtful and modest friend of mine, Sidney Shaw, who
had been trained as an engineer but was then out of work.
With him I planned a small experimental group of boys and
girls in which, I said, we would test out afresh what all of us
then called 'tribal training' theories of education. And if it
did well, a new movement, released from the stale debate
which had ruined Kibbo Kift, might spring from our efforts.
We started early in 1 925 in Lewisham, with four small boys :
the small boys have long since grown up and married, but
they live in the neighbourhood still, and I still hear of them:
presently we added small girls so that the movement could be
genuinely co-educational. It had long been one of our points
of criticism of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides that the sexes
were too sharply separated : o ne could not have a movement,
dose in feeling to the family or the tribe, without freedom
for both sexes within it.
The exhilarating business of building everything, from the
ground up, gripped me from the moment of that beginn
ing, and before long a small but genuine movement came into
existence which called itself The Woodcraft Folk it used the
word folk in German sense of volk and not in the English
'fairy' or 'art-and-crafty' sense-which was able to rely upon
co-operative soCiettes for support and encouragement.
Eventually my group and several others came together and
drew up a dignified Charter which read :
'We declare that it is our desire to develop in ourselves, for
the service of the people, mental and physical health, and
communal responsibility, by camping out and living in dose
contact with nature, by using the creative faculty both of
our minds and our hands, and by sincerity in all our dealings
with our neighbours : we declare that it is our desire to make
ourselves familiar with the history of the world, and the
62
'

'

O H Y O U N G MEN

OH

YOUNG

COMRADES

'

development of man in the slow march of evolution that we

may understand and revere the Great Spirit which urges all
things to perfect themselves.
'We further declare that the welfare of the community can
be assured only when the instruments of production are owned
by the community, and all things necessary for the good of the
race are produced by common service for the common use;
when the production of all things that directly or indirectly
destroy human life ceases to be; and when man shall turn his
labour from private greed to social service to increase the
happiness of mankind, and when nations shall cease to suckle
tribal enmities and unite in common fellowship.'
Not long after this, in a pamphlet which drafted an
educational programme for the new movement, I wrote
this:
'Our education is not a matter of little moral talks or stilted
lectures, it is a system wherein the prima! instincts ' of the
child are moulded along a social path by the very things a
child loves. In truth we let a child train itself and we see that it
grows from within and is not coerced from without. Hand
in hand we go with our children to explore and examine all
that life holds out to us. So it comes about that our principles of
training permeate the whole of our activities; every symbol,
every totem, every song has its own peculiar value, and no
action from acting a charade to boiling a billy of water is
devoid of significance. We feel that it is necessary, if the race
is to survive, to produce men and women who by their know
ledge, their physical fitness and their mental independence
shall bring quick, sure brains and boundless vitality to bear
on man's struggle for liberty. We are the revolution. With the
health that is ours and with the intellect and physique that
will be the heritage of those we train we are paving the way
for that reorganization of the economic system which will
mark the rebirth of the human race.'
I see now a clear contradiction, not obvious to me at the
time, between the simple and indeed humble educational
argument of the first part of that statement, and the extrava
gant assertion that we were the revolution. How genuine, how
ever, was our belief that one had to 'Learn by doing, teach by
being' . Rousseau's Emile had enormous inftuence on us, and
when I read toay such hooks as Herbert Read's Education for
6g

'

O H Y O UN G MEN OH Y O U N G C O M R A DE S

'

Peace I am transported nostalgically back to my own early

theorizing: for we talked then as he talks now, of the need to
wrench education away from 'abstractions' and to ground it
in contact with 'real things'. In school much more than half
we had learnt had been at secondhand. We learnt about the
world, we saw little more than our own suburbs. \Ve were told
of the lives ofwriters : we read comics. Bored teachers, informed
by textbooks written by tired hacks, made of things great and
resplendent in their own right something weary and perfunc
tory. And so we, like Herbert Read, came with exhilaration to
the dictum of Rousseau that the child must be kept dependent
on things. For heaven's sake, we declared to each other, let's
do real things, and for the leader who could talk well but
could not light a fire or dig a latrine, we had no use. And there
is just no doubt at all that this camping and open air life we
promoted, which gave a child the opportunity to pit his energy
and ingenuity against practical problems, worked wonders for
undersized children from the slums, affiicted with a sense
of their own inferiority, and lost in the greedy, competitive
world.
How right, indeed, we were to condemn education in
'abstractions' . But how easily we fell into the opposite error,
that because one ought to concern oneself with things, there
are only things to be concerned with. The abstractions which
belong to pedants and pedagogues have nothing to do with the
spirit, whether the creative spirit of man or the Great Spirit
of the Woodcraft Folk charter, but in the effort to hustle away
abstractions and to come down to the experience of co
operative Jiving, how easy it was to confuse the invisible
spirit with the 'tedious abstraction' and kick both down the
stairs.
Yet the truth was that the movement I founded did not base
itself upon hooks or learning, or even upon its ferociously
worded demand for a social revolution. This was mostly window
dressing, unconsciously indulged in to satisfy the prevailing
'left' di mate of those years. We belonged to a blood brother
hood of the campfire. We pursued an ideal of toughness which
made us contemptuous of ease and respectability and involved
us in a hatred of the weak, the sick and, above all, the elderly.
My great friend and disciple was a master plumber named
Brown. He had a gift for composing tunes, strumming them on
64

' o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M RADES '

the p1ano to build them round the 'new folk songs' I was
writing-

My love she is a woodcraft lass,

She doth all other maids surpass,
There never was a girl so fair
As this young thing with nutbrown hair.
or

You passed me many miles from town

(Sing charabanc, O charabanc)
I passed a motor and a ditch
I could not tell you which was which
(Sing charabanc, O charabanc)
Brown was invaluable at camp, where upon problems of
organization and sanitation his knowledge was expert. Despite
his devotion to the primitive, he took our kit to camp on his
motor-cycle combination and always brought his blow-lamp
with him. If it rained abominably he would string a seven
pound sweet tin, full of water, to the tent-pole, and, cigarette
in one hand and lighted blow-lamp in the other, brew up for
tea as imperturbably as an y British workman 'on the job'. I
recall that one night we returned together from the Inn
at Colgate, and stumbled along Lovers Lane in the dark
to the tents we had left sprawled in a half circle in Dragon
Valley. There, at the valley foot, rose a ring of sky-piercing
pines round which circled the old ironmaster's stream in which
the boys splashed naked every day: in the centre of that sombre
and magnificent copse we lit the nightly campfire and smelled
the pine incense and held our initiations. Now there was silence
in the camp. The boys had been sent to bed befare we left and
the fire had died down to a smoulder. But when we arrived we
found them all up still, separated into small, mutinous parties,
No one greeted us. We went the round of the tents, making a
roll-call. In one we found a half-dressed boy, crouching with
his bottom in the air, frying his bacon over a candle. Questioned,
he said he was hungry, and thought it was nearly breakfast
time. In another a small, very wet boy, muttering with anger,
sat on his ground-sheet in a puddle, refusing to do anything
about it but stare mulishly at us from behind his spectacles.
E
65

' o H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S '

'They threw me in, sir! They threw me in !' he shouted. 'They

got me wet, let them get me dry !'
'We threw him in because he was going to sneak !' others
shouted from their tent-doors.
'What were you going to tell?' I asked.
'If you tell, Foxy, we'll chuck you in again !'
'What were you going to tell?' I asked again, but befare the
boy had time to answer the others rudely interrupted.
'We don't have to tell in the Folk,' shouted a boy with fair,
spiky hair. 'It's a free movement. We don't have leaders and
obey orders like we do at school. This isn' t the army. We can
do what we like.'
'Was he the one who pushed you in?' I asked with interest.
Foxy nodded stubbornly, his lips tight.
'Come out, both of you,' I said. The squelching Foxy
did so, and the other boy leapt out in his pyjama trousers,
squaring up pugilistically, his frail white torso flaring in the
blackness.
'Yah,' someone else yelled, 'we don't fight either in the
Folk.'
The pugilistic boy dropped his fists.
'What about pushing him in?' I asked Foxy. 'To make it
even.'
'Come on,' jeered the other encouragingly, 'try it. What you
scared of?' Little Foxy, dripping still, drooped his eyes to the
ground. The other was full of rage at this timidity. 'Who cares
about getting wet? If that's all that anyone wants to make it
quits I'll push myself in!' And he gave a tremendous backward
leap into the pool we had dug, just as he was, and yelled and
thrashed about with savage glee. Foxy grinned with great
satisfaction, and went contentedly to bed. Brown and I looked
at each other grimly. The era of toughness had begun. On the
morrow, I had two complaints to deal with : from the farmer
that someone had been laying snares in his meadows for rabbits,
and from a neighbouring landowner that in the dead of night
a felon had chopped down a decaying pine tree and carted it
away. I could not restrain raising my eyebrows at the mar
vellous pile of pine logs stacked neatly by the council fire, and
at the sudden suspicious business of all my comrades. Finally,
the boy with the fair spiky hair, who had led the rebellion,
given a glass of home-made eider at the farmhouse was
66

' oH

Y O UNG M E N O H Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

comatose for the rest oftheday. It was remembrance ofincidents

like these which made me write in later years : 'Some young
men who founded a youth movement became so engrossed
with their work as to forget the passage of time until present!y
they were reminded of it by the appearance of mere boys who
demonstrated against the rule of baldheads and potbellies.
Alas, these same boys, in the moment of victory, found behind
them the children, who argued fiercely against the tyranny of
the old men of eighteen.'
Every activity in town was nothing more than a dusty sub
stitute for life in the open. The fire was the heart of every camp :
the place where it stood was the council circle, and there we
opened all our gatherings ceremonially. Round the burning
heart of the movement we sang songs, told stories, made love,
and argued far into the night. Tardily arriving, we strode down
the hill towards the thrilling diapason of a hundred voices. We
had heard this compelling note far away: it had excited us to
hurry when the fire, in the distance, was no more than a single
coal burning in the mist. Now to see, as one came near, the dis
embodied faces of one's friends and girls in that rosy gleam
was to come longingly home at last into the fellowship one
loved with all one's soul. Every kind of life but this was to be
despised.
When the night grew late the young, self-conscious herald
stood up. Last night he ws a schoolboy in baggy grey flannels
and worn blue blazer, a cap holding down his shock of chest
nut hair. To-night his hair fell over his brow, a bronze mane
the firelight made molten. To-night he wore a silk surcoat of
blue and gold, surmounted by a crowing cock in red. He stepped
into the circle and said, with uplifted hand, in a voice which
made solemn the hieratic moment :

Now doth the blackness of night encircle us

And the night wind whispers in the larches:
Now doth night erifold us like a cloak
And the earth is still, savefor the owls and the beasts that hunt,
And we, the Woodcraft Folk, have assembled in festivity
Since the setting of the sun,
Now the .flames .flicker and die,
And the ashes grow grey upon the folkstead.

'

O H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S

'

To which the leader replied commandingly:

To your tents, O woodcraflers,

And may stillness ride over the camp.
May you sleep and rise rifreshed
When the light sparkles on the dew wet grass.
Peace!
Peace be to all men!
And so, with a final song, a ' Campfire Carol' I had myself
written, the circle would break, and the boys and girls, blanket
laden, rustle through the wet grass to their tents, set in a circle
round the campfire, which presently the candles and torches
transformed into a string of blowing Chinese lanterns, whose
wet silk was luminous in the dark and fantastic with angular
silhouettes. In the early morning a single Herald, or a group of
boys and girls trained in verse-speaking, would stand by the
dead campfire and recite:

All ye who dwell within the camp

Awake! Arise!
For the earth has east off the black cap of night
And is arrayed in the white garment of day.
All ye who dwell within the camp
Awake! Arise!
And there is the heart of the thing, the longing to live a kind
of poetry, which so fulfilled the deep emotional hungers of the
young people who joined it that some of them would speak of
it as a new religion. Despite the socialist dressing we gave to
everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future
reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content
of the actual life we were living at that moment. We were
conscious that our youth was slipping away, and that unless
we lived now the life we ought to live, the chance would soon
be gone forever. For this reason we were bitterly attacked by
Communists and doctrinaire Socialists who wanted only
immediate and unconditional sacrifice for a hypothetical
future revolution. On our side we were ranged critically against
the whole apparatus of contemporary society, condemning it
all at heart, including the dreary working dass movements
with their endless committees and conferences meeting in
dusty, smake-laden halls, and lacking in colour, excitement and
68

'O H

YO UNG

M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S '

grandeur. Even the revolutionaries we found drab, with their

boring demands for protest or demonstration 'against the boss
dass'. It had become a mechanical formula even as long ago
as that. Whatever was wrong it was always 'the boss dass'
which was to blame. One could only get rid of it. There was
nothing one could do by oneself. How supine and ignoble a
surrender of one's vitality this seemed to us ! There was some
thing repellent too in the mercenary working dass concern
with wages and conditions when what was wrong was civiliza
tion itself. We were socialists, that is to say, of the Edward
Carpenter stamp, in love with a mystical vision of England
suffering 'a sea change in to something rich and strange' . And
we were not without patriotism either, as this Kiplingesque
song I wrote for the movement shows : it was a favourite for
many years.

England,
By the tracks the .fiintmen made,
By the men who cut the chalk,
By barrows and by grassy trails
Across the hills our young feet walk,
Our vows are green, our hearts are brave,
We pledge them thee by ashen stave.
B)' Saxon plow and Celtic sword
By the king who burnt the cake
By the rebel Hereward,
England, motlzer, for your sake
Make us strong, make us brave
England by the ashen stave.
We made thrilling contact with continental youth move
ments making an identical protest against the adult world.
They were nearly all, at first, to be found in Germany, and
stemmed from the pre-war vVandervogel rather than Con
tinental Social-Democracy. They too rejected urban and
industrial civilization and bourgeois values in favour of the free
brotherhood, tramping 'into the blue'. For them also the camp
fire was the heart of the movement: the initiation of their youth
was to leap naked through its flames. We shared illimitable
horizons with them and the contacts then made did not come
to an end until Hitler came to power. On our side we regretted
6g

0H

Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

the staidness and conventionality of our countrymen, for

this compelled us to remain small and ineffectual while the
membership of the German Buende ran into hundreds of
thousands.
I trace now with the greatest of difficulty the pattern of the
youth I was then, who began movement-building in his teens.
I can hardly avoid reading a sophistication into my adolescent
.
self which must have been completely absent. I was rude, naive,
opinionated and a prey to the most complex wishes and hopes.
My ideas were few and not very original but they possessed
me like demons and I had no option but to try and live by them.
And what energy! I was up at six-thirty every morning to
spend two hours writing the textbook I had planned for the
Folk, then spent the day in Fleet Street, and rushed off at night
to meetings and demonstrations. My week-ends were all taken
up with hikes or camps. It quieted my despairs to find a full and
active life in the service of something so hopeful. My energy
was fed by an irrational fear that I might die quite soon. At the
age of fifteen I had read somewhere that it was most important
to do immediately the things you felt ought to be done, for no
one should imagine he had the whole of a long life befare him.
One great man, the writer said, always worked with the feeling
that in two or three years he would be dead. I became obsessed
with the idea that I should die by the time I was twenty
one: it would be tragic to do so with absolutely nothing
accomplished.
It would have been as well if, with a rather more personal
canniness, I had made some preparations to meet my own
future. One tenth of the hard work I put into the new mave
ment would have got me into a university, had there been some
means of supporting myself there. But this ambition did not, I
confess, ever once occur to me. Boys and girls of my dass did
not go to universities : from the beginning to the end of my
schooldays I never once heard schoolmaster, parent or friend
mention a university as in any sense a possible or desirable
goal for me or my contemporaries. I instinctively rejected, too,
any counting-house calculations about my 'career' : they were
an affront to my idealism. One ought to do what one believed
must be done, without thought of the cost. Calculations about
the future were utterly opposed to the spirit of the youth-move
ment, and expectation ofearly death madethem useless anyway.
70

'oH

YOUNG MEN O H YOUNG COMRADES

'

But if the way had been miraculously smoothed for me,

would I have accepted the gift offortune? I doubt it. I was deep
in the dream flood of my generation, swimming only with its
tide, powerless to climb on to the bank. I wanted nothing out
side that flood, and would have felt it treasonable to desert my
comrades for a life which had nothing to do with my own class.
I was impatient of all sitting still, and had a deep distrust of
learning for its own sake-after all it was a world stuffed with
learning which had come to ruins about our ears-while to
get learning for the sake of a career was contemptibly bour
geois : to study in order to change society alone was worth
while.
The hostility to book learning had two sources-one was the
longing for living experience in place of dead words, and the
other was hatred for the older generation, with which I felt
nothing in common. Civilization was about to die, and the
future belonged only to us, the young, who were going to build
a hetter one. It was, after all, a new paganism that we sought
and a new barbarism we managed to achieve. Those of us who
founded the movement had behind us Christian experience
and education : we had been steeped in the patriotic history of
our country and from boyhood had worshipped poets, heroes
and kings. This background enriched our rebellion against
society, and even in the act of throwing all away we were deep
in its debt. But what of those who were our disciples? Why
should they honour the spiritual heritage we threw contemp
tuously away? Of course, they could not. It was a hocus-pocus
which we taught them was irrelevant or meaningless. And to
the subsequent broods of converts, all that Christian past of
Europe, and nearly all the background of European culture,
was wrapped up and east away with the stereotyped con
demnation 'the capitalist system', with which no right-minded
youth ought to have anything to do. From the first, I am
afraid, the Woodcraft Folk, by the orientation I gave it, was set
on the road of spiritual desiccation. It had less and less to offer
with each decade, and understood less and less of what it
rejected. This perhaps would be of slight importance, for the
Woodcraft Folk has never been a very large or influential
organization: but it remains an important symbol : the rejection
of the past which it attempted was common to almost the whole
of European youth. Denial of civilization became everywhere
71

'

O H Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M RA D E S

'

a cult and an organization, and much European history turns

on the mood which my youth movement then typified.
These were not the emotions which moved me when, with
the success of the new groups founded locally beyond doubt,
I called together friends of my own age to a meeting in the
garden of our house. I was twenty and in an exalted mood, for
the mantle was upon me. We sat under the flag-post I had
erected as a boy at the bottom of the garden by the tall ash
tree, where I had once flown the Union Jack at half-mast
because of Kitchener's death. My elder brother was one
of the group. We had lain side by side in bed many a night
arguing about religion and socialism and he had at last aban
doned his High Church convictions and come over to my side.
He became the new movement's treasurer and brought to its
wildcat schemes a solidity and commonsense in financial affairs
which served it very well in its first decade: he and his wife
both gave it devoted service and I was very glad to have their
support. I talked of the need for an adult group to train leaders
and to send out missionaries to found new groups. It was
this solemn meeting of dedication rather than earlier efforts
which started the Woodcraft Folk on its career, for it gave
birth to a group of inspired young evangelists. I concluded
by reading the new kindred a poem I had written. I had burnt
in disgust all the things I had written since I was sixteen, and
then started once again to write. The poem was called
'The Song of Creation' and it derived from Walt Whitman and
Edward Carpenter, the writers I had been thrilled to find
were speaking the galden tongue we most longed to hear. 'The
Song of Creation' spoke of the fiery movement of the cosmos
and the burgeoning of life on the planet and made, with great
elan, a mystical identification of our young movement with
the life force. Yet there were other passages, of a realism which
revealed my sickness and despair in the face of modem life,
and more than anything else they illuminate for me now the
genesis of the movement. It was certainly fitting that the mave
ment which tri ed to live a poem should have been founded on one.

The people pass and repass in the streets,

Torn posters fiap from garish hoardings,
The trams rattle along, and messenger boys with perky faces
whistle music-hall ditties,
72

'oH

Y O U N G M E N OH Y O U N G C O M R A D E S

'

Mothers hurry past with bowed heads and weary eyes to do their
shopping,
The unemployed shu.Jfle along or lean against the walls and gaze
into nothingness,
And I am frightened and made ill by their dazed and despairing
faces.
A train rumbles over a bridge and its smoke wreathes down into the
dusty street,
Granes and derricks swing from factory walls and the workmen
shout and sweat as they unload their drays,
The backing horses sweat and exert their knotted muscles and
there is fear in their eyes and dilated nostrils,
But the carter only curses their stumbling and clattering
( But even here, can I, the Song, be heard.)

Washing jlaps in dingy backyards, and dirty children gambol in

the gutters,
From the mouths of babes and sucklings issues forth the accumu
lated lingualjilth of civilization,
I peer into drab houses, with tlzeir ricketty stairs and faded wall
paper,
I peer into crowded rooms wlzere men and women herd together, and
grumble and grouse about work and one another,
And go out and buy an evening edition for the racing,
I peer into the huddled minds of little children and divine their
fears and their agonies, and their minds steeped in the
futility of the grown-up,
(I peer and am sony)
I peer into backyards where the closet door swings open on broken
hinges and the dustbin oveiflows with garbage and stench.
And lo! a rage fills me and I would cry destruction on the city and
its evil ways,
Damning the teeming life within it to the abyss cif the forgotten,
Fear and hatred scorch my soul and I recoil and lust to break the
bonds that bind me:
For over beyond the smoke stack rises a vision of cloud shadows on
the downs, and the sun on the golden wheat,
And I would shout and rage lest the town o'erpower me.
73

' o H YOUNG MEN O H YOUNG COMRADES '

Then the hatred passes and I would weep for slzattered lives and
empty days,
For the agony that created nothing but this,
And my sang rises clear and goes whispering into the hearts of the
cruslzed,
And wis(/ul glances are east at the sky.

74

CHAPTER F O U R

The Council of Action

ver since the Great War revolution had brooded over

When still a schoolboy, walking home with
aching jaw from the school dentist at the bottom of Deptford
High Street, I had seen the police and returned soldiers fighting
outside the clubs and institutes formed for demobilized men,
and, in my first years in the city, I watched the ragged grey
crowds behind their sombrely burning red banners stream
defiantly out of the East End while, concealed in the courts and
alleys of Aldgate, the posses of mounted police waited. In I 92 I ,
the year of the great coal lock-out, and of an unending heat
wave, when under the urgent daily sun, pitiless on the pave
ments, the smokeless city had glowed as golden as a Canaletto
townscape along the Thames, posters had appeared every
where declaring a state of emergency, and asking for volunteers
for a national reserve. The reserve was to fight the reds, and I
wondered whether they would take me, young as I was, to help
to guard the factories and pitheads. In the years since I had
become one of the reds myself, devouring the papers for news
of unrest and rebellion to satisfy my craving for a violent end
to it all, and reading the Daily Herald ostentatiously at a time
when to be seen with it in a railway carriage was to be met with
curious or hostile stares. There was enough violence in the
world for those hungry for it: the world was in tumult from the
Ruhr to China. A new Germany was already growing up in an
atmosphere of assassination, street brawls and marching
private armies. It hardly seemed possible that, with all this
ferment, the burning hopes and angers of the proletariat
could fail to issue in the universal socialist commonwealth

E England.

75

THE C O U N C I L O F ACTION

which was our dream. Many times I began privately to fear

that my youth movement had come too late-that the revolu
tion would be over before we were ready to take a leading part
in it.
In 1 92 5 , the struggle between miners and coal-owners
dominated the national scene. It looked indeed as though in
the summer of that year, when the Woodcraft Folk was holding
its first summer camp, the miners would be locked out and
a general strike called to support them. We talked much
round our campfires of the mining dispute: we did not alto
gether understand it, certainly not that the mining industry
was paying the price of the pioneering years of the r 9th century.
The haphazard and reckless exploitation of coalfields was
beginning to exact a dividend in present disorder. The boom
years of the war and post-war periods were over, and now, in
the face of reparations coal and Polish coal, and an artificially
dear pound, the foreign trade was slumping. Mines everywhere
were working at a loss while the miner still enjoyed the good
rates of pay he had won during the war. However, the econo
mics of mining, even if we understood them, did not move us:
it was the human situation which roused us, the drive against
the living conditions of the miners, against the men whose work
in the black and dripping pits was the most arduous of the
whole working dass. Our manhood was shamed by the thought.
It was intolerable that the pressure to lower standards stemmed
from men comfortably situated, to whom economics came
before humanity.
The 1 92 5 crisis was avoided because at the eleventh hour
the Government awarded the industry a subsidy to meet its
losses and to maintain wages, and appointed a Commission to
study the industry. Neither side regarded this as anything more
than a breathing space for manuvre in which they were to be
allowed to lumber like tanks, hull down into the best shooting
positions they could find. The Government began to make
preparations to meet a stoppage which were directcd princip
ally against a General Strike, and all indications that it was
going to get ready to resist provoked shrill, spinsterly cries from
the left of 'governmental fascism !'
Looking back, one sees that the appointmcnt of the Samuel
Commission was a master stroke: it placcd the miners in a false
position, since they had accepted the Government subsidy
76

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

during the period of its deliberations and were therefore

under an obligation to acknowledge and study the findings.
The Report of the Commission was far from tender to the mine
owners: its proposals for reorganization of the industry went a
considerable way towards meeting the criticisms of the miners
and, carried into effect, might have proved a stepping stone
to outright nationalization. Above all, the demonstration that
7 2 per cent of the coal was being mined at a loss, lent formid
able weight to the proposal to reduce wages or lengthen hours
as a temporary measure to save the industry. The Report
was an honest and reasonable one : but no party to the dispute
regarded it as anything but the opportunity for continued
intransigencies. Miners demanded that the schemes for reform
should precede discussion of wage reductions : mine-owners
could only think of immediate wage reductions : the Govern
ment made ready to wash its hands of subsidy.
All winter through the noise of battle rolled : the debate
grew more heated with the publication of the Report and the
approaching end of the subsidy. The mine-owners gave notice
of their intention to lock the men out : the T.U.C. maintained
that it would fight the miners' case. It was not until the end of
April, on my twenty-first birthday, that the crisis broke.
It was a sad coming-of-age for me, for though a splendid
party had been planned in the local church hall, and most of
the leaders of the new movement had been invited, almost on
the eve of it my mother was taken ill and rushed off to Barts'
Hospital to be operated on for appendicitis. I sat with my
father in the cold waiting room miserable with longing. How
flushed and ill she had been, bent double with pain, and how
frightened ! My misery was worse because I was conscience
stricken. I cared little, I knew, in the ordinary way, how she
felt, or whether she were ill or well. I was too busy to bother
now that I was pursuing my own life with such egotism and
ambition. She toiled and slaved for us all, and I was not
grateful, and I hated my ingratitude. I remembered the last
time she had been seriously ill, and I, thinking she was dying,
had sat on the hot flagstones in the backyard beating my
head against the lavatory door so that I might not hear her
cries. I felt again like that small boy, longing for consolation,
for the sound of her voice, the most clear and musical that I
knew, and the touch of her hand, so worn with work. After all,
77

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

there were still seven of us at home to cook, wash and dean for :
we never realized how much we loved ;md needed her until she
fell ill. Good news of her operation came in the end, but it
was a long time coming. It was many days before she was off
the danger list, and weeks before she was out of hospital, for
complications set in.
A party under such a doud was not to be thought of, and
I went home and wrote cancellations to all my friends. When I
visited mother, bringing books and flowers, she said sadly,
'Why don't people come to see me?' 'It's the General Strike,
mother,' I said, eyes downcast with shame. 'There are no
trains, buses or trams running.' 'It's terrible,' she said with a
sigh. 'And so you cancelled the party. And all because of me !
What a shame. How unlucky you are with things like that,
Leslie. Kenneth had such a lovely party. We must have yours
when I'm better.' But a 2 r st birthday party months after the
event was a celebration I had the wisdom not to attempt.
I spent much of my birthday hanging round the Farringdon
Road Memorial Hall, dose by Ludgate Circus, where, behind
the grim granite facade, the Trade Union delegates had
gathered, under threat of the lockout notices handed to the
miners, to debate the General Strike. Since I was a journalist
I had no difficulty in worming my way into the lobby and
wheedling information out of the delegates, who poured out
now and then to smoke on the doorstep. I liked them instinc
tively, and not only because they were on our side. They were
placid, pipe-smoking and genial: most wore tweeds and three
and-ninepenny cloth caps from 'the Co-op'. They beamed with
red, open air faces and spoke with the accents of the smoky
northern industrial towns. One felt that with very little change
they could have become a Cup-tie crowd, and worn big
rosettes and swung rattles in the Underground. Any revolution
that was to come out of them could not help but be distin
guished by commonsense and moderation. When the Trade
Union great arrived the delegates respectfully cleared a space
for them, as if they had been royalty. In the excitement of
fishing for news, and smelling the atmosphere of history, I kept
forgetting that the date was so portentous to me. When, with
a start, I did remember, it was to acknowledge gloomily that
so far I had done little or nothing of all the things I had
planned. At little more than my age Pitt had been Prime
78

THE COUNCIL

OF A C T I O N

Minister! Though I had been spared the early death I had once
believed myself marked down for, what had I done with the
time I had saved? I looked with alarm on my entry into the
third decade of my life, for it seemed in a sense to be the last,
for I could not imagine that there was any life worth living
after one was thirty.
The amiable, pipe-smoking delegates to the Conference
which was to decide about the strike had lost some of the
intransigence they had displayed a year earlier. The Samuel
Report had done that: they were no langer so exhilarated about
rebellion, they were more ready to count the cost. They were
rather like schoolboy strikers who, in the first flush of the
morning, had moun ted in pyjamas to the ro of of the school and
crowned the flagpost with the customary chamber pot, and
shouted defiance at the ushers in the yard below, but who, as
the evening approached, and the cold wind began to whistle,
regretted their impulsiveness, made painfully aware either that
they must descend with tails between their legs to a frightful
wb,ipping or go on to some absolutely incalculable act of
defiance, such as setting fire to the school. It was the 'incalcul
able act' which faced the T.U.C. after months of formal
defiance. How could they retreat when, from midday on the
First of May, most of the miners were already locked out? Yes,
pithead gates were already shut, and black knots of wondering
men already gathering at street corners in the mining valleys,
shining their shoulders against walls, or sitting with feet in the
gutter, discussing what this very gathering was going to do.
But if they went on with defiance, could they control it? The
T.U.C. were in fact imploring the Government for a lead. But
the Government was like the headmaster who just would not
promise the boys dancing on the roof a general amnesty.
W. J. Brown, enfant terrible of the Trade Union movement
then not less than now, told the hesitating delegates : 'l con
trast the atmosphere of this meeting with the atmosphere which
existed nine months ago. There is not a man here who cannot
feel that the atmosphere is chilly.' He went on to say of the
continued but abortive negotiations on my birthday. 'We are
asked to adjourn to-day on the night before what may be the
last day of negotiations, without any conclusive demonstration
of where the movement stands. It recalls to my mind the
situation at the outbreak of the European war when our own
79

THE

COUNCIL O F ACTION

Prime Minister, rather than say where this country stood,

preferred to do exactly what the General Council is doing here
to-day-to stand aloof and to leave the attitude of the country
in doubt right up to the last moment.' There were cries of
'No' from a few, but the mass of delegates stirred guiltily and
uneasily.
It was burly Bevin, the dockers' man, who, with that massive
patience of his which was very near to genius, assembled the
situation intellectually in such a way that the delegates could
face it with a sense of responsibility.
'You are moving into an extraordinary position. In twenty
four hours from now you may have ceased being separate
Unions for this purpose. For this purpose you will become one
union with no autonomy. The miners will have to throw their
lot and cause in to the common cause of the general movement,
and the general movement will have to take the responsibility
for seeing it through. But at the moment we feel that to begin
wielding any sort of threat in connection with the negotiations,
in the stage they are now in, would be to place a weapon in the
hands of our opponents.
'We are asking you to stay in London. You are to be our
Parliament, you are to be our Assembly, our constituent As
sembly, an assembly where we will place the facts and figures
and the proposals and problems that have to be submitted for
cairn judgment, and at the end take your instructions.
'The men ought not to be asked to make sacrifices until the
other cards have been put upon the table, and until re
organized methods and their effect are put into operation.
That is our view. That is where we stand. I beg of the Con
ference to record this fact, that the negotiating committee will
go back to Mr. Baldwin strengthened by this decision, streng
thened by this offer, strengthened by the willingness of the
Conference to put force on one side and enthrone reason in
trying to find a solution. But if the enthronement of reason is
refused, let it be refused by our opponents and let them take
the consequences. '
The mood of fright leaked out to those of u s who waited in
lobby or in street. 'My usual critics will say that Thomas was
grovelling,' the railman's leader said. 'And all my colleagues
will bear testimony to it, I never begged and pleaded like I
begged and pleaded all day to-day, and I pleaded not alone
8o

THE COUNCIL OF ACTION

because l bel.ievcd in the case of the miners, but because in my

bones I believed that my duty to the country involved it.'
James Ramsay Macdonald protested, in a speech that reads
now like a parody of every one that he ever made, that they had
been accused ofwanting war, 'In the name of everything I hold
sacred, in the name of the most conscientious beliefs that I have
got, I tell you, and I tell the British public, that I have never
been associated with a body of men that have striven, that have
fought, that have turned phrases and words and facts over
more patiently, more religiously, with a more firm desire to
make peace and to have peace, than the colleagues with whom
I have been working during the last two or three days. At ten
o'clock last night, I confess to you, I believed that we had got
peace . . . .
'Ah, my friends, I am still, I confess, old-fashioned enough
to believe in public opinion. More, I have another cardinal
creed-I believe in the fair-mindedness of British public
opinion, and I cannot help thinking, although the sands have
almost emptied in the glass-at twenty minutes past two on
Saturday, and the miners locked out-I cannot help feeling that
there are men belonging to the Government who are ashamed
of last night.'
But on what terms had they nearly got peace? The miners
were afraid that the T.U.C. would sell them out. The miners
were uneasy lest there should not be a fight. The delegates,
like passengers on a sinking liner, sang 'Lead, Kindly Light'.
Yet when it came to the vote they did what anybody looking
at . them in the lobby knew that they would do, they voted to
stand by their word to the miners. The hands that were raised
stood for three and a half million workers.
The strike was on, the whisper flashed about in the street.
We burst into a ragged cheer. 'Every man behind the miners.
Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay ! ' we chanted.
Indeed the strike was on whether the T.U. leaders wanted it
or not, for when the printers refused to set the leading article
of Monday's Daily Mai!, the door of r o Downing Street shut
in protest, and the forlorn T.U. negotiators learnt that the
Prime Minister, cut to the quick by this act, or so he said, had
gone to bed with orders not to be disturbed. To rouse a Prime
Minister in the middle of the night, and bring him down in
his pyj ama,s, candle in hand, to listen to protes.tations of
F

8r

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N .

innocence from embarrassed T.U. officials was an act against

decorum not to be thought of though the world fell.
There was another aspect of this struggle which went far
to explain the misgivings of trade union and labour leaders,
and that was the deadly war waged in the Labour movement
itself between left and right. Far more bitter things were said
and done in this war, than were said or done against the
Government. The tragi-comedy of the Zinoviev letter in the
autumn election of I 924, which threw out the Labour
Government, showed how vulnerable the Labour Party was to
the accusation that it sought, not Parliamentary democracy,
but revolution on the Russian model. Angry debates inside the
Party led to the decision of the Liverpool Conference of 1 925
to make Communists ineligible for membership of the Labour
Party. This was argued (by the left) to be a clear signal to the
authorities that the Communists had been politically outlawed.
And it certainly happened that the police swooped. I took part
myself in demonstrations in Covent Garden against the arrest
of Communist leaders, and managed to get a seat on the press
benches at Bow Street when the proceedings began. I argued
then, among my friends, that the case against the Communists
logically demanded not the imprisonment of a few leaders, but
the declaration that the Communist Party was illegal, since
it conspired by violence against the crown. As the Government
had not taken this step, it was difficult to resist the conclusion
that it was simply trying to weaken the left-wing of the Labour
Movement befare the crucial struggle.
In my novel about those days, Men in May, I wrote :
'Ah comrade, do you suppose the Government ain't spoiling
for a fight? Do you remember the angry deliberations at
Liverpool, when Labour cut off the Communists? Then do you
remember the Conservative Conference out for blood-red
blood-and their leader promising they would hunt the red
fox and all who cared might be blooded by its brush at the
kill? Do you remember Bow Street, and the porters from
Covent Garden and the scores of protesters from the East End,
and the Red Flag going up and the scuffie when the police
tried to snaffie it, and the line of cops driving up towards the
Opera House, beating back the crowd, thrusting and cursing,
jabbing their truncheons into soft bellies and smashing down
with iron feet upon tender insteps? And the chase round the
82

T H E C O U N C I L OF A CT I O N

market for that Red Flag, the thrown rotten apples, the thrown
abuse, the slithering in a mess of cabbage leaves and fruit
garbage? And the packed court, the packed proceedings, the
delays, the legal visages, the case for Old Bailey, and the young
line of them across the court, not looking as though they could
hurt a fly?'
Many local constituency parties refused to throw out the
Communists and, defying the Party executive, hung on to
Party funds and property. This was the case in John Wilmot's
constituency, East Lewisham, where I had established the first
woodcraft groups. There the executive was left-wing and the
Party trustees and candidate were right-wing. Quarrels
between the two wings had even led to scuffies at Party meet
ings: the atmosphere seemed to me savage with hate and
frustration, and I recoiled with grief from the discredit it east
on Socialism. It was a sad fact that in scores of other places a
similar situation had been generated.
The Trades Union Congress itself was faced with serious
opposition from the Minority Movement, led by Harry Pollitt,
the boilermaker, which boasted a membership of 75 0,000.
Even the unemployed had been organized by the Communists
to fight the battle against the Labour leadership. A proliferating
left-wing, ready at the !east word of moderation to shrill out
'treachery', kept up a constant barrage against the official
leadership of the Trade Union and Labour Movements. And
this was the wing which, on the eve of the General Strike, put
forward a series of demands that, if acceded to, would have
carried the strike forward to revolution.
The right-wing leaders knew well the ambition of the left
to dispossess them of office and power. Naturally they resisted,
but not only on the basis of self-interest. A General Strike
which led to violence, to an open dash with the armed forces,
would benefit only the left. From such a dash the decent, non
violent mass of trade-unionists would certainly recoil. There
was no anarcho-syndicalist tradition in Britain to carry the
fight on to the streets. If the recoil issued in Trade Union
defeat then the working-dass organizations, which bad taken
more than a century to build, would be ruined. The workers
would be left without protection. One can understand the mis
givings of the Trades Union Congress, and the ease with which
in the end they called the strike off.
Sg

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

Where did I stand? I carefully avoided labelling myself at

this time because I passionately desired the unity of the Labour
Movement and hoped to sec come into existence an open
minded 'centre' group of socialists who would pull the two
wings together. But most of my sympathies were with the
theories, if not the deeds, of the left. They alone spoke for my
impatience. They wanted to have done with talk and get down
to action. They spoke out for the kind of political battle-plan
necessary if action is to come out of talk. They bad the boldness
to say that democratic methods might prove ineffective in
certain situations, and other means be forced upon us whether
we wanted them or not. Even, they said, a great industrial
strike has political implications, while a General Strike is
inevitably a spear pointed at the heart of the capitalist govern
ment. It was dishonesty to pretend that this was not so, and
that one was not challenging the very life of the system. This
seemed to me to be indisputable ground, which, nevertheless,
the right-wing brushed aside. And when, at the same time, it
went to the Government whining and cap-in-hand, like a
bunch of waiters or tipsters, my pride also revolted. However,
I was never wholly carried away by the left. A fanatical
independence of mind made me reject the efforts of the Com
munist Party to control the thinking of its members, and I did
not respond therefore to overtures made to me to join. The
everlasting hymn of hate made me uneasy. Angry as I was with
society, the flushed faces of left-wing orators, the glazed eye,
the denunciatory fingers, the rows of indignant comrades
trembling on the words of the speakers often filled me with
dismay. I was afraid of this mass hysteria, of a violence of
feeling which did not seem to be 'given' in the initial circum
stances of whatever case they were making. Even when I
myself was speaking (and I bad discovered in myself unsus
pected powers of oratory) I would grow afraid of my ascend
ancy over an audience, and would sometimes try to lower
the temperature by dropping into another, more casual and
intimate key. Yet my ability to see the evils of demagogy did
not prevent me from being carried away time and time again.
A Trades Council conference in Lewisham, to which I was
summoned by virtue of my authority over youth, decided to set
up a Council of Action in the event of a strike. I was put on the
Executive Committee, and Sidney Shaw and I decided to give
84

T IU: C O U N C I L O F A CT I O N

our whole time to its service. He was then still unemployed and
I, on my part, decided that while the strike was on I would not
go to my father's office. As a gesture this east me nothing, for
no newspapers were published during the nine days of the
strike, and I was certain not to get the sack. But I did not
intend it as a gesture: I simply did not wish to be left out in the
cold when there was a revolution brewing. The sack would
have meant nothing to me in my exaltation just then, for I
did not think that there would be any newspapers except
socialist anes when the strike was over.
On the morning of May 3rd, Shaw came to my house, lean
and eager-faced, and smiling diffidently, but inwardly just as
excited as I was. Vl/e walked across to the Labour Party offices,
but they were empty. Not a soul was about. It was a dismal
anti-climax to our expectations. Wc went to knock up the
Trades Council Secretary, to find out what he proposed to do
about this shameful inactivity. He was a little man who stood
on the doorstep in shirt sleeves and carpet slippers, regarding
us with large short-sighted eyes. Our presence disconcerted
him. He kept peering at us as if he'd never seen us befare, but
was anxious nevertheless to oblige us by saying the right kind
of thing, and he kept agitatedly feeling in his waistcoat pockets
as if one of them might contain a booklet of instructions on
what to do in the event of a General Strike. But nothing came
out of them except the stub of a pencil and an old envelope,
and he licked the stub and stared at the empty back of the
envelope hopefully, as though fully prepared to take down the
minutes of this doorstep meeting if instructed to do so. And his
wife, from the interior of the house, called out what sounded
like 'S-i-d-ne-e-y ! ' He grew fussed at that call, and looked down
at his carpet slippers and said he'd be along first thing after
dinner to set things going. 'Though, however, comrades, I
don't quite know what we can do. ' He stared at the privet hedge
and scratched his head. I started to explain what I thought
ought to be done, but Shaw pulled at my elbow. The man's
wife was staring angrily along the passage at us. Her hair was
in paper curlers, and I thought her shapeless white dress
gathered into tucks at neck and wrists might actually be a
night-dress. So we said, 'See you later, comrade,' and went off
quickly not to embarrass him further. Perhaps, I said to Shaw,
he'd been hoping to spend the whole strike sitting at home by
as

THE COUNCI L OF A CTION

the wireless or feeding the chickens. Or in bed, said Shaw, with

that! We brake into delighted laughter which restored our
boyish sense of a glorious adventure hardly yet begun.
Early in the afternoon, kicking our heels at the Labour
Party headquarters again, a tall man of middle years, wearing
a battered trilby and a worn blue raincoat, came in. He had
the lean, stringy face and the neck made of knotted old ropes
which one finds so aften in the docker or heavy industrial
worker. One day, I could see, Shaw would look j ust like that.
The man was an Arsenal fitter, and his name was James, and
he was the Trades Council chairman. He looked at us with
cold, small blue eyes and rubbed the sandy scrub of his chin.
It made a sound like sandpaper against his horny hand.
'Well, what do you young bastards want?' he said.
'Bastard yourself, comrade,' I said under my breath.
'What did you say?'
'Well, if you want to know I said . . . ' I began with rising
voice. He cut me short.
'Oh, all right. I heard. I suppose you want to do something?
What there is to do in this dead-and-alive hole, I don't know.'
I began to expatiate and he brake into a wide grin which
revealed long, tobacco-stained fangs. The effect was diabolical.
'Steady mate,' he said. 'One
thing at a time.'
From that moment, really, our Council of Action was horn,
for we went upstairs to the office to concoct a bulletin which I
sat and typed out on a wax stencil. We duplicated this and
when Howard, the Secretary, arrived he set out on his bicycle
to deliver a copy to each Trade Union branch secretary. The
bulletin told what we had heard of the success of the strike call,
asked the Lewjsham workers for 'a hundred per cent response',
and explained what it was hoped to do through the Council of
Action. We pinned a copy of the bulletin on the notice board
outside, with a copy of the T.U.C. General Strike Order, fully
conscious that we were setting something huge in motion and
that our world would be changed by it.
Within a few days, and with the most remarkable spon
taneity, an organization leapt into existence. We worked like
men inspired for it. Quite soon, and almost without thinking
what we were doing, we would have created a machine, if
things had gane o ur way, capable of administering the borough.
The ground floor of the Headquarters was given over during
--

86

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

certain hours of the day to the branch secretaries of trade

unions without local offices of their own, so that the men could
attend and sign on, as their union rules required if they were
going to draw strike pay. From the strikers who trooped in and
out all day lang we organized rosters of messengers who came
and parked their cycles, motor-bikes and cars along the kerb
side, and waited for duties to be given to them. From the offices
of the Executive upstairs we spread aur net. In the hands of
James were all Trade Union affairs: he organized mass picket
ing, rushing groups of men by bicycle or on foot to any factory
in the vicinity where men were trickling back, or had not come
out. At one Government plant, where there was same con
fusion over strike orders, the men came out and went back
again three times in nine days. On the other hand, the T.U.C.
had instructed building workers on bausing sites to stay at
work, and they hated this, and every now and then they would
just cease work and troop off the building lots in protest.
James, with the local builder's secretary, was always being
called out to harangue them to go back to work, an errand
which he, as a leftwinger, abominated. He did it very well, but
only by getting furious first and stamping round the office
swearing. A woman member was busy planning saup kitchens
and relief parcels of food in case the strike lengthened until
it brought general distress. There was a Finance Secretary
making appeals everywhere to raise the funds to keep the
Council of Action going. Howard kept records, organized the
office, saw to the typing, duplicating and distribution of all the
bulletins and circulars we sent out. After the local Fascists
had driven by ane night in a car without lights and thrown
bricks at our windows, Shaw was deputed to take charge of
the H.Q. Guard. I wanted to have it called a Workers' Defence
Corps, and to give the members armlets as they were doing in
other localities, but my proposal was squashed. Nevertheless,
in my own field I was king, and that was propaganda and
publicity. My department distributed the British Worker, pro
duced a daily bulletin and ran about seven apen-air meetings
every night of the strike. The meetings were attended by large
quiet crowds of working and middle dass folk anxious to under
stand the issues. There was never a hostile voice at them save
that of the occasional Communist shouting 'Watch aht Thomas
and Co. don't seil aht on yer'. We took large collections and as
87

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

the days wore on began to draw more and more support from
the middle dass. It was gratifying to us when a well-to-do
professional or business man stopped his car at our offices and
came in shyly and said 'l think the miner's cause is just-is there
anything I can do to help?' From them, mostly, we collected
the cadre of owner-drivers ready to take strike leaders anywhere
in the borough. The warnings which came through from the
T. U.C. about police spies made us look thoughtfully at the feet
of any stranger who offered himself: and more than one
innocent sympathizer was embarrassed by our dubious gaze at
his boots or, because of the size of them, sent empty away.
One day a comrade urged upon us the necessity to run
meetings on a vacant lot near a new housing estate. I was asked
to apen it. On the evening I walked across to it I was followed
all the way by three youths with Fascist emblems in their
buttonholes. These Fascist lads, mostly in their teens, used to
hang about at street corners near our Headquarters watching
the comings and goings there, though what they hoped to gain
by that I could not imagine. My hackles rose at the sensation
of being shadowed, but when I got to the soapbox the secretary
surprised me by saying, 'There's same Fascists have said they'll
break up any labour meeting held here. I think they're waiting
to heave a brick at the first chap to get up.' I looked about.
The vacant lot was littered with half bricks. If there was going
to be a fight both sides would find plenty of ammunition. 'In
that case,' I said. ' 1'11 arm myself too,' and as I mounted the
rostrum I picked up half a brick. 'Comrades, ' I said, 'I was
told that as soon as I got up someone was going to heave a brick
at me. A Fascist. Well, here I am : in case there's a shortage of
ammunition here's halfa brick for whoever wants it.' I held up my
weapon. There was a laugh, as much at my theatricalism as any
thing else, and sheepishly I dropped my half-brick and plunged
hurriedly in to a description of the troubles of the coal industry.
The strikers themselves had sometimes only a most confused
nation of the aims of the strike, or of the proper behaviour of
strikers. One had to be as much on guard for the man who
regarded it as a holiday from his ordinary work so that he
could take up paid employment of another kind for a few days,
as against the man who thought of it as a schoolboy lark
which licensed him to throw bricks at windows. A railway
man with a harelip, a lang; lean, figure-S kind of man, lounged
88

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

into the office one day to report that blacklegs were working
on the line. As if we didn't know ! But he was curiously factual.
"Ow d'ye know all this?' askedjames suspiciously.
The railwayman looked round at us with a bright uneasy
smile and a moist eye. 'Oh, me and my mate, we took a dekka.'
'What d'ye mean, took a dekka?'
'We went and 'ad a look, see? We got fed up and walked down
to London, just lookin' in at same of them strike 'eadquarters
on the way, where our mates was. And when we got to London
we was too bloody tired to walk back. So we went to London
Bridge, and there we see a blackleg train waitin', and we
come back on it. Talk about a bleedin' lark
'
J arnes blew off the to p.
'You dirty little squit you,' he shouted. 'You're on strike-a
railwayman-and you ride on a blackleg train? And you
come and tell me all about it? Get out of these Headquarters
befare you're thrown out !'
The railwayman looked deeply hurt.
'Blimey, comrade. I'm on strike same as you. It ain't
blacklegging to ride on a blackleg train, so's to see what's
goin' on !'
'Not blacklegging? What would you think of me if I went
ridin' around in a blackleg hus?'
'Well, if that's your attitude . . .' The railwayman drew
himself up as though he were a duchess who had just heard a
coarse word. 'I think I'd hetter go.' With a show of hauteur
he went to the door. But befare he reached it, another member
of the executive, a broad-built man with a flat enigmatic
face, tight lips and thick black brows, whose name I have
forgotten, slid his back against the door and closed it. I had
never seen him so angry: the skin beneath his eyes was blanched
with fury.
'Just a minute, comrade,' said this menacing figure. 'We're
not done with you yet. Stand over there if you please. We
want to know more about this blackleg business. How you
know all about it.'
The railwayman went white, the fight gone out of him, and
did as he was told. I felt myself exulting in our power over him.
His harelip trembled, and little beads of sweat sprang up
among the half-shaved hairs there. He rubbed the back of his
cap across his face and shot us a terrified look. He thought we
8g
--

T H E C O U N C I L OF A C T I O N

were going to beat him up. I thought, too, that this was in the
mind of his inquisitor.
'You ain't got no right . . .' he began to mumble, and then
stopped before the threat of our silence. He darted furious
little glances at the man by the door and started to gabble.
'Blimey, it wasn't nothing. Back in the station at 'lther Green
we nips round to the goods yard and 'as a squint to see if
them waggons what we was unloadin' Satterday was still
there, an 'ops over the fence. There was some blokes workin'
on them what we didn't know. The posh type what don't
know 'ow to 'old a shovel. We bombarded 'em with lumps of
coal and then we 'ops over the fence again.'
'How do we know you've been telling the truth. How do we
know you weren't blacklegging yourself?'
'Well, I tole you. And I didn't come 'ere to listen to no
bleedin' inquisition neither.' He was recovering his nerve.
'Blinkin' likely l'd 'ave come 'ere if I 'ad.'
'Suppose you are telling the truth,' the other continued
more quietly, but without moving from the door, 'what d'you
think your story sounds like-riding in blackleg trains? Suppose
you saw a mate of yourn coming out of the station-what
would you think immediately?'
'We didn't come out of no station. We climbed over the
fence.'
'But you went into a station,' shouted Jarnes. 'Yo u got into
a train !' Then losing his temper, he jumped up and pushed the
man towards the door. 'Get out before I black your eyes and
throw you down the stairs.' The railwayman made a half
hearted show of resistance and was hustled out.
'Well, I come 'ere to tell you and that's all the thanks I get,'
he shouted, sheepish and defiant, as he went dumping down
the stairs.
'What's your name,' shouted James down the stairs, and
a defiant bellow no one could catch came back. 'Go after him,
Paul, and get his name. We'll put in a report to his branch
secretary.'
These were the kind of troubles with which James had to
deal. There were more than a few refractory strikers who
resented any effort on the part of the Council of Action to
exert its authority. I saw with some irony that the more
successful we were in our work the more we would arouse
go

THE COUNCIL OF ACTION

jealousy and spite among certain followers. There is one kind

of working man who resents more than anything else the
authority of another working man over him. I had trouble
with a man called Johnstone who used to haunt labour meetings
collecting subscriptions for the Unemployed Workers
Committee Movement. He was the local secretary.

CHAPTER F I V E

D eath of an Informer

ohnstone was a tall man with a limp and an unpleasant,

half-truculent, half-wheedling manner. He had an asym
etrical face, as though one side of it had been pulled down by
the drag of his limp, with pudgy red cheeks and nase, and
wet pursy lips. In my memories of him I see him always
dragging his crippled limb along in a half-run to catch up
with somebody. I had subscribed to his unemployed association
and for a lang time had received badly duplicated circulars
inviting me to speak at rallies and demonstrations of the
unemployed. His association was rather arrogan tly demanding
a [4 a week minimum 'wage' for unemployed men and
as this was rather more than I was earning myself I
was not very sympathetic to the idea : nor, of <;:ourse, were
many working men whose income was no greater than mine.
However, Johnstone regarded me as one of his men and
came wheedling to me with same proposition whenever he
met me.
He appeared in the crowd of men at the door of the Council's
Headquarters early in the strike looking for me. He caught my
arm. 'How's the strike doing, comrade,' he asked, his eyes
glittering all over me. 'Oh fine,' I said. 'Are they all out?'
'Just about 1 00 per cent in the borough,' I replied proudly.
'Is there anything I can do in the office? l'm pretty good in an
office. l'm secretary of the unemployed, you know. We ought
to be in on it, comrade, in the interests of solidarity.' He was
brimful of officiousness. 'I'll think about it,' I said, and, not
liking him much, put him out of my mind, though several
times after that I noticed him threading through the crowd of
92

D E ATH

OF A N I N F OR M E R

strikers on someone or other's trail. Then one day I met him

coming down the stairs from the office. He looked embarrassed.
'I hin lookin' for you. You promised me some work.' I could
not remember what I had promised him and so I found him
some pamphlets to take away and seil.
That night I walked home from a street-corner meeting
with little 'Father Goodrich,' a socialist pioneer who was never
tired of telling me of the days of John Bums and the docker's
tanner, and the speeches and deeds of Hyndman and Tom
Mann. 'Them were the days. Socialism was a religion then,
comrade, not a dogfight. We'd have died any day for it.' Small,
and drcssed in black, with a white trembling goatee and a red
tie he looked rather like a dissenting minister of the previous
century. With age, he had grown garrulous and excitable,
and all those weary meetings of the local Party, in which left
and right had recently contended for mastery in envenomed
debate, had left their mark on him. It was a wonder he had
not died of a seizure at one of them : he had grown so incoherent
with misery during them that in place of the words he was
burning to say, a froth alone would splutter from his mouth and
hang for a moment on his breath before falling in white
flakes on his beard and tie. I would drop my eyes, unable to
bear the exhibition of his distress. His home life was a sad one,
for his heavy-boned wife was bed-ridden with dropsy, and this
gnome of a man had to wait upon her, as my mother said, who
knew them both, 'hand and foot'. I hard ly listen ed to Good
rich's chatter, just tenderly regarded him as one might a
child. But he said something about Johnstone-whom he
insisted on calling John Stone-which stuck in my mind.
'Hey, I don't trust that man John Stone what's always cadging
around. Him that walks with a little limp. He's too friendly
with the coppers. I know all the coppers in the town for l've
mended most of their boots in my time.' Father Goodrich
had no personal malice in him and this was something I
could not ignore. I mentioned it to J arnes in the morning. He
gave me an angry glare.
'What?' he said. 'He's one of your men isn't he? Don't you
know your own men?'
I went white with fury.
'He isn't my man. He's secretary of the unemployed com
mittee. He just volunteered and I let him seil papers.'
93

DEATH

OF

AN

INFO RMER

'Well, he's always rooting round up here saying he's looking

for you. Shoot the
nark out.'
It made me angry to think that mere rumour seemed so
readily accepted as fact, and judgment passed accordingly,
but we had neither the time nor the means to make enquiries,
and from that day we instituted passes and no one was allowed
upstairs in the Council of Action committee rooms without one.
Two of Shaw's guards stood at the foot of the stairs to check
people in and out. Within a few hours Johnstone was grabbing
me fiercely by the arm, his face working aggressively.
'What's the idea mate? They won't let me in the H.Q.'
'You have to have passes now. That's why.'
'Yus, but it ain't only that. He said it was acourse of me,'
he said surlily.
I sighed, determined to be straight with him. 'To tell you
the truth, Johnstone, somebody said you were too friendly
with the coppers. You'd hetter get yourself cleared of that.'
An indescribable look of misery and fright contorted his face.
The real truth is he's mad, I thought, anxious only to escape
him. He tried to grab me as I walked and began to bluster and
swear. 'Who was the bastard, who was he? 1'11 break every
bone in his body. Who was he?' His cries and curses pursued
me down the street.
Later in the same day Johnstone was found on our floor
of the building. No one knew how he had got past the guard.
It was Howard who tackled him about his authority for being
there.
'l've come 'ere to 'elp. I don't see what bloody business it is
of yourn. You ask Paul. Paul promised me when the strike
began. Looks as though you don't want no 'elp. Something
fishy about this Council.' And, ugly in attitude, he stood there
unmovmg.
'I didn't promise you anything. In fact I told you the
opposite this morning. We don't want you unless you can
clear yourself.'
'Ain't nothin' to clear, Mr. Bleedin' Paul.'
'We can't help your grievances, comrade,' said Howard,
politely, his spectacles glinting. 'Do you come to sign on?'
'Ain't nothing to sign on for, 'cept at the Labour Exchange !'
'Got a pass admitting you?'
'Don't see why I shouldn't 'ave, same as everybody else.'
--

94

D E ATH

OF

AN I N F O R MER

'Out you go then. Ifyou're not satisfied, write to the Council.'

'I've written, see, Mr. Smart. Written to Mr. Bloody James,
and he don't care to answer letters. Some folks is too big for
their shoes.' He glared at me. 'You fetch 'im. 'E ain't no hetter
than the rest of us.'
'If l fetch him he'll have you thrown out.'
Johnstone flushed angrily and caught hold of the back of a
chair with his big red hands as though he would fight for his
right to stay. He looked at Howard and me. 'Bloody little
upstarts !' We said nothing, but waited grimly. He limped to
the door.
'Look 'ere, you ain't got no right to keep me out of 'ere !'
he shouted back, his fist on the doorknob. And he scowled at
our silence and dropped his eyes, and went down the stairs
swearing and throwing himself angrily about to cover his
humiliation. It was the last we were to see of him for some time,
though he did not cease to haunt the Headquarters entirely.
The President of the local Painter's Union, a man called
Lee, wrote to the Council offering his services as a speaker,
and telling us, by the way, that he had spoken for the Deptford
Council of Action at Deptford Broadway. His letter was
discussed by the Executive and his services accepted. However
there were opposition voices, on no grounds as far as I could
see except that he was a stranger and therefore they distrusted
him. There was this to be said in favour of caution about
new speakers that at the end of the first week of the strike a
ripple of violence had spread through South London. Vast
crowds had gathered at New Cross tram depot to prevent the
emergence of blackleg trams : a police charge had dispersed
them, but the volunteer drivers had been so intimidated that
they remained shut up in the depot under the protection of the
police. At Deptford Broadway, where Lee claimed to have
spaken, a recent meeting had ended in a riot between strikers
and police : bottles had been thrown and mounted police
unseated and mauled. Men had been irUured on both sides
and tempers made permanently ugly. The record of Lewisham
was so far dean. The left-wing members of our Council were
not averse to violence in theory, but they were Englishmen too,
with a constitutional aversion to it in practice, and certainly
to the casual and unpredictable kind which results in broken
heads and smashed windows, and alienates public opinion
95

DEATH

OF

AN

INFORMER

without furthering the cause. At heart, too, many of us were

rather less revolutionary than we pretended to be and would
have regarded arrest, no matter in what cause, as a disgracc
which would cause the neighbours to talk. Lee, as I said, was
accepted, but from that moment everything went wrong.
He spoke for the first and last time on the second Tuesday
of the strike at our chief corner pitch in the heart of the borough,
not far from the famous obelisk. It was a pitch very accessible
to crowds from Deptford. I spoke for an hour and left an
orderly and sympathetic meeting, to run up to Eccleston
Square to fetch the Council's ration of British Workers. vVhen
I returned about midnight the Headquarters, usually silent by
then, was ablaze with lights and an excited emergency meeting
of the Executive was in full swing. There was a cry of relief
when I appeared. 'Nobody knew where you were, mate,'
someone cried. 'We thought you were pinched, or clubbed
over the head.'
I pieced the story together. Lee, they said, bad behaved most
pr6vocatively. He had hardly got on the rostrum before he
began to abuse the police. He pulled a card out of his pocket.
'The police want to know who I am. 1'11 show them who I am.
l'm a trade unionist. Here is my card and all paid up too.'
He pointed at the policemen on the outskirts of the large
crowd and said : 'They had a union once, and they could do
with one now, then we'd all be together. Remember the
police strike? What the police did on<:;e they could do again,
and if any of you bad any manhood you'd have those uniforms
off and be with us again. ' This roused the crowd, and especially
that element which had taken part in the Deptford riots.
'Blacklegs !' some of them shouted at the police. 'Down with
the police !' and others, remembering the Deptford Broadway
fight, said 'Yus, if they'd come over to us we shouldn't have no
horses chasing us.' Lee went on in a fine defiant style, 'The
earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; and if anyone else
claims it, they've pinched it from the Lord, and as the Lord
meant the earth for everyone alike, that means they've pinched
it from you and me.' As there were still some shouts at the
police from the edge of the crowd, Lee shouted, 'Don't worry
about them. They can't hurt you. l've addressed larger
meetings than this in Hyde Park and they wouldn't arrest me,
and they daren't arrest me tonight.'
g6

DEATH

OF

AN

INFORMER

This challenge was very swiftly taken up and within a few

moments a squad of mounted men and a posse on foot appeared
on the scene and with truncheons drawn charged at the
meeting and dispersed it and arrested Lee. The crowd had run
in all directions and everyone had be:en too much taken by
surprise to organize any retaliation. By the time I reached the
Headquarters rumour and exaggeration had done their work
and inftated accounts of brutality and injury to women and
children were accepted by everyone as authentic. However no
real evidence ever emerged about this and there were no
hospital reports about anyone that we knew.
We argued about the affair half the night. It seemed incred
ible to us that a quite new speaker, had with his first words
incited the police against him. How was it, we asked ourselves,
that the police had responded so quickly that within a minute
or two of Lee's remarks squads had appeared on the scene and
dispersed the meeting! This efficiency made us feel nervous.
Had he really been provocative, or was it all an excuse to
open a police drive against strikers' meetings irrespective of
what was said by anyone?
Lee came up before the Greenwich Police Court on the
next day. He was sincerely and profusely apologetic. He would
not have said what he did, he confessed, if he had known that
it was illegal to address the police in such a way. The magistrate
took a lenient view and he was given the option of a [,2 5 fine or
one month. There was a row in the Council over whether we
should pay or not. I can't remember that we ever did, and
therefore it's probable that only the Painter's Union saved
him from a month in prison. But the two events, the suspicion
surrounding Johnstone, and the opening of violence against
the strikers in our borough after Lee's speech at the Clocktower,
filled me with the uneasy sense that ranged against us were
not only the o pen forces of the state, as we expected, but some
thing ugly and secret.
In time we should have come to know whether an offensive
was being launched against us or not. Rumour was strong in
our ranks that the government was going to break the strike
by violence. Warrants, it was said, were out for the arrest of
Pugh, Bevin, Thomas and other strike leaders. Father Goodrich,
who claimed to know, said that the tickets of the Council of
Action men were already written out. The arrest of the national
Q

97

DEATH

OF

AN I N F O R M E R

leaders was to be the signal for the netting of the local fry. But
we were never to learn whether this attack was planned, for
the strike ended on the day Lee was tried.
About midday rumours that the strike was to be called off
caused crowds to gather outside the Headquarters. We were
dismayed by them, but decided to deny them, and a notice
was posted on the board outside which said 'Take no notice of
rumours over the wireless or anywhere else. The strike is still
on. Lewisham workers are, like the rest of the country, 1 00
per cent solid. Do not be deceived into going back. Keep in
touch with your branch officials.' And after that we put up a
list of the places where public meetings would be held that
night. But even as I was posting this notice the B.B.C. was
broadcasting the terms of surrender signed by Pugh and
Citrine : ' In order to resume negotiations the General Council
of the T.U.C. has to-day decided to terminate the General
Strike and telegrams of instruction are being sent to the
General Secretaries of affiliated unions. Members before
acting must await the definite instructions of their own Exec
utive Councils.' Later we received a telegram couched in much
the same terms. We collapsed into wretchedness. It was too
early to shout that we were betrayed but privately that was the
only thing of which we were certain. That for which the strike
had been called had not been achieved. The miners were not
going back, or there would be no 'resuming of negotiations' :
nothing was said about the withdrawal of the lock-out notices
posted by the owners. The General Council had nothing but
some assurances from Sir Herbert Samuel which did not rule
out wage reductions. We kept saying to each other, in an
agitated way, 'We must keep calm' and we handed out this
wonderful phrase to enquirers, and repeated it at all the public
meetings. But what were we to do on the morrow? Go back to
the boring daily round after this intoxicating taste of power?
The next day all was confusion. Strikers were trying to get
from branch secretaries, who were trying to get from district
secretaries, who were trying to get from executives the terms on
which they should go back. More men than ever were out of
work. Some transport workers took the broadcasts that the
strike was off as a personal instruction and reported back to
work, so that in our own borough we heard of strike-breakers
and strikers jointly running vehicles. This so infuriated
g8

D EA T H

OF

AN

INFORMER

the local busmen that they formed a procession to march on the

local hus garage and demand the terms upon which work was
to be resumed. They had not got halfway before police barred
their way and when a tram came along and broke the police
ranks a wild melee and chase developed through the streets.
We began to think that things might go our way after all,
and a soldiers' battle develop now that the generals had left the
field to parley, and so we thought of strengthening rather than
weakening the Council of Action. We did not know yet how
thoroughly we were beaten.
The radio was the principal instrument in the defeat of the
strike. It was the first time the working dass movement had had
to fight against such a weapon. We had no idea of its strength.
It was heard at the fireside of the striker just as easily as at the
hearth of his opponent. It says much for the reputation of the
B.B.C. that its word was accepted as much by the striker as by
everyone else. The British Worker, emasculated to the point ot
supineness, was toa feeble an organ to reply even to the
British Ga;;.ette, edited with a Churchillian gusta. It certainly
had no answer to the radio. Nothing in the whole crisis was as
effective as Baldwin's broadcast on the fifth day of the strike.
Conciliatory in tone, but firm and good-humoured, it was a
fireside chat which turned the course of history. Not even
Judge Astbury's dictum that the strike was illegal had so much
effect. The Trade Union leaders learnt from it that all nego
tiations were closed until the strike was over. The general public
saw, perhaps for the first time, the issue as the Government
understood it-that the life of the nation was being dislocated
and the people threatened with starvation if they did not
submit to the will of a body, not elected by the voters of the
country, which had decreed, without consulting the rank and
file trade unionist, 'that the railways shall not run, that
transport shall not mave, that the unloading of ships shall
stop, and that no news shall reach the public'. A sovereign
Parliament could not yield befare threats.
How vulnerable we were upon strictly democratic principles !
From the moment ofthat speech our cause began to lose ground
at its very heart. The General Council knew that they had
either to give in, or intensify the struggle. They had now,
if they were to go on, to call out the builders, the dustmen, the
electricians, the gasworkers, the telephone workers and the
99

DEATH

OF

AN

INFORMER

distributive employees, and so produce a total state of siege

which only martial law could break. The workers would, I
think, have come out, but the consequences of such an act of
defiance, certain to alienate the whole middle dass, were
enough to daunt leaders looking for means of retreat rather
than an extension of the offensive.
Ernest Bevin, at an interview with the Prime Minister on the
evening the strike ended, paid his tribute to Baldwin's broad
cast. 'It helped us to rise to the occasion,' he said, like a boy
thanking the vicar for a confirmation sermon. 'I thought
personally-of course, it is so difficult when you have to do it
without conversing-I really felt in the event of our taking the
lead in assuring you we were going to play the game and put
our people back, that it was going to be free and unfettered
negotiations with the parties very speedily, because thousands
of aur people cannot go back if the colliers are still out, and if
the colliers are still out it is going to make a smooth running
of the machine extremely difficult.'
One is compelled to admit now-I would have died rather
than admit it then-that the Government behaved generously.
A few days after the end of the strike it offered terms of settle
ment which included no less than four bills to give effect to the
Samuel Commission proposals, a further term of subsidy, and a
reduction of wages only for a num ber of weeks to be specified
by agreement. The miners would have lost less than they
ultimately lost if they had accepted these terms: but their
black anger, their anguished sense of betrayal and desertion,
which leapt from every hysterical speech that their leader
A. J. Cook delivered, made it impossible for the terms to get
. a moment's consideration.
In Lewisham the Council of Action melted away. Who was
willing to work for it any more? The temporary unity of the
local movement, a source of happiness and pride to Shaw and
me, collapsed. The right-wing, for the most part silent during
the struggle, feared the ascendancy which the militant days
had given to such brutally outspoken left-wing socialists as
Frank J arnes, and were relieved to see the strike out of the way
so that they might continue once again the parliamentary
work in which, they believed, and history was to bear them
out, the true future of the Labour Movement to Iie. But they
had ahead a bitter struggle which lasted all the summer of r g26.
1 00

DEATH

OF

AN

I NFORMER

The Lewisham Labour Party, with FrankJames as its chairman,

refused to operate the decision to expel communists. This
brought down upon it the wrath of the Labour Party Executive,
which made haste to expel it as rapidly as possible: a struggle
began all over again for the soul of the socialists of Lewisham,
and John Wilmot, to whom in truth the local Party owed its
creation, left the outlawed body and began once again to build
up his Party. The dis-affiliated body melted slowly away, a
pawn for a few months in the hands of the local communists,
who gleefully used it for wrecking tactics but abandoned it
once its prestige was gone in the locality.
Johnstone, the man who had caused me so much trouble,
continued to hang around the Labour Parties of Lewisham and
to press his claim to represent the unemployed. But they too
disowned him when the bad odour into which he had fallen,
through that chance remark of Goodrich's, became generally
known. Eventually he disappeared from the scene, only however
to write for me the most mysterious offootnotes to the Strike.
In 1 92 7 he left his wife and four children in their little
council house and went off with another woman, to Southend.
What transpired there in this runaway match of guilty lovers
no one will ever know, but early one morning she too left him,
creeping out of their lodgings shoes in hand. Johnstone awoke
one summer's day to find that his world had come to an end.
He wrote two letters which spoke of his desperation : to his
wife he said, 'Retribution has followed swiftly. I am lonely, ever
so lonely. Nobody loves me and I die among strangers. ' To the
woman he wrote with a simple eloquence and a genuine
feeling a letter which threw quite another light upon him,
'Darling
Though times out of number you loved me
passionately, yet you left me while I was asleep without saying
goodbye, and you left me with only a halfpenny in my pocket
to run mad around Southend looking for you. You knew the
only alternative for me but you left me to die amongst utter
strangers. Sweetheart, how could you do it, but I die still
laving you. ' He took poison on Southend Beach and when they
found his body in the morning these letters were in the pocket
of his jacket. They were made public at the inquest.
Human nature is utterly strange and incalculable. The last
thing ane could have imagined is that the two women in the
case could have come together afterwards, but seemingly they
--

J.() I

DEATH

OF

AN

INFORMER

did so, and the result of their collaboration was a storm which
blew all the way up to Parliament. Mrs. Johnstone and the
woman he ran away with signed sworn affidavits which
asserted that Johnstone had been in the pay of Scotland Yard
and was employed by them as a spy in the National
Unemployed Workers Committee Movement. The documents
also stated that his distress and suicide-the 'retribution that
followed swiftly'-were the result not of a lovers' dff but of his
exposure in the Labour Movement as a police spy, and the
cutting off of his weekly wage from the secret service. No less a
person than Sir Oswald Mosley, then a young Labour M.P.
with every promise of a brilliant career in front of him, pressed
this matter, to the great embarrassment of the Home Secretary.
The Minister would give neither affirmation nor denial of the
matter. A secret service, he said, was, he had always assumed,
secret, or it was no service. And with this bland rejection of
information the opposition had to rest content. Wc argued
that he must have been an informer, or the Government
would have made very great haste to deny it. When I came
to write a novel of the General Strike, Men in May, I put
many of the strike characters I had met into it, and built it
round the story of Johnstone, whom I renamed Thorenson.
This effort to found my fiction on truth a num ber of reviewers
found 'far-fetched' or 'unlikely' which, if it tells us nothing
else, confirms that the path of the social historian using fiction
as his vehicle is a hard one.

1 02

C HAPTER S I X

The D edicated Life

T May had aften been as empty as City streets on a Sunday

he wide, wet streets of Lewisham in that cold and windy

morning. A Sabbatical calm had descended on them : at aur

Headquarters and in the hearts of the strikers all might be
agitation, but we were few, and the borough droned on in the
kind of doze in which ane waits for muffins and Sunday
afternoon tea. On the main road out to Bromley many and
many a day a vista of at least a mile had been barren of all
traffic and its wet blank surface was turned up to the drizzle
like the exposed soul of the bourgeoisie. The magnolias and the
almond blossom in the gardens 'made their stiff signals of
spring in vain' . The tramlines, even, had rusted over, and at
ane point I saw thin slivers of the greenest of grass shooting up
between the wood blocks. I pictured, as Richard J efferies did
in After London, the Carthaginian ruin that might so easily
overtake a great city. Now, with the end of the strike, as by a
turn of the switch, all was changed. The impetuous tide of
London rolled on again, the tawny trams groaning and
clanging and re-polishing the steel rails, the buses, with red
flanks and shining noses, purring everywhere. I knew how
much I had missed the morris of the streets which aur strike
had checked. Within a few days the strike was obliterated.
It made ane wonder whether anything ane could ever do
would shake the self-assurance of this wealthy and placid
country. I was back at work in Fleet Street, having missed the
days when ane could stroll arm-in-arm with one's friends down
the centre of it without fear of the massacring traffic, and the
presses were thundering again like horses on the home stretch.
I 03

T H E D ED I C ATED L I F E

Pantlin and my father made bitter but oblique remarks about

ruin and red revolution and 'some people must count them
selves very lucky' which I did my best to pretend were not
directed at me. To my friends I spoke grandiosely about 'The
Great Betrayal' and to the Woodcraft Folk that this confirmed
the need for our kind of work. A new and hetter human
material was needed : what could be done with the human
wreckage which capitalism had left lying about? Parodying
an aphorism of Lloyd George I said, and this became our
slogan for a long time, 'You can't get A r Socialism from C3
people'. And, thinking of Johnstone, I meant this in a moral
as well as in a physical sense.
My bitterness about the strike was somewhat assuaged when
Gordon Ellis gave me a more objective picture of it than I
could then make myself. We had lunch together in the
Devereux just opposite the Law Courts and Ellis stroked his
long patrician nose as he lectured to me in his thin intellectual
voice about the strike. 'The Labour Movement just had to get
anarcho-syndicalism out of its system. This idea of One Big
Union, and One Big Strike to end all strikes, has been ferment
ing ever since the days of the Chartists. It's the old syndicalist
idea that one can by-pass the political institutions of a country,
and that men organized in their economic status can determine
the fate of the country through their economic organs. That
speech of Bevin, about the Special Strike Conference acting
as a constituent assembly, was pure syndicalism. A new
Parliament, an industrial Parliament, was going to dictate
terms to the old, political Parliament. It's all the fault of that
man Sorel and his dream on one great romantic gesture which
would bring the bourgeois world down in ruins. But at once,
you see, Leslie, they came up against the political notion of
sovereignty. lt's in the political institutions, not the economic
ones, whatever the Marxists say, that sovereignty is embodied.
Could any government abdicate before the threat of the
economic organs of one dass? Could a Socialist government
have abdicated before the threat of the Fcderation of British
Industries? It doesn't make sense. The political method of
change is slow, but it works. One only bums one's fingers with
this wild stuff out of the textbooks of Bakunin.' I opened my
eyes at all this heretical talk to which in my ignorance of
Sorel and Bakunin I could think of no adequate reply. 'And
1 04

T H E D ED I CA T E D L I F E

now the howl that the Trade Union movement is putting up

against the Trade Disputes Bill announced by the Government
is incredibly stupid, and all, really, because it is proposed to
substitute the principle of 'contracting-in' for 'contracting-out' :
that is, in future, trade unionists will have to decide personally
they want to support the Labour Party, and will sign a doc
ument saying so. In the past, a conference made the decision
and the ordinary member had to go through a long rigmarole
which exposed him to much moral pressure, and even
persecution from the fanatics, if he wanted to 'contract-out'.
But what, I ask you, is the democratic way? Why, the way
of 'contracting-in' : we ought to be offering up prayers
of thanks to the Government for insisting on the democratic
principle in our own movement ! The other method of the
mass vote means that you do not have to bother to go
out and convert the individual trade-unionist. No, the money
rolls in from a conveyor belt and bureaucrats fed with money
take the place of a movement fed with conviciton. If trade
unionists want to support the Labour Party, let them decide
individually so, don't force them to wriggle out of a contract
they never entered into. That's the really criminal thing, not
the Government bill. ' My eyes grew wider and wider at what I
had been taught was reactionary propaganda. ' Compulsory
support for a Party is no hetter than Mussolini's way. Heaven
forbid that the Labour Party should ever have to depend on it.'
Most of us so hated our defeat that we struggled to push the
strike out of mind. Quite soon it was as though this experiment
had never been made. The whole Labour Movement conspired
to forget it and of all the great events of the inter-war years
this is the one which has had the least attention from historians
and sociologists. I have often wondered why, for it was in some
ways the most significant of European events of the 'twenties.
That it could be made at all in peaceful, democratic Britain
showed how masterly was the leadership and impressive the
solidarity of the trade union movement. But that, at the very
height of events, with perhaps four or five million men out of
work and the country in the grip of a paralysis without paraBel
in its history, the leaders could quite calmly, and with the
minimum of explanation, call the whole thing off, and be
obeyed, pointed to the complete intellectual and moral
ascendancy of the right-wing leaders over the whole movement.
r os

T H E D E D I C A TED L I F E

For the strike confirmed Bevin, Thomas, Pugh, Purcell and the
rest in their leadership. Its failure began the disintegration
not of their organization, but of the Minority Movement
promoted by the Communist Party. If the collapse of the
strike had proclaimed the ascendancy of Parliament over the
nation, it had no less confirmed the ascendancy of the trade
union leadership over the revolutionary left-wing. The left
wing, which imagined the collapse proved their case for a
change of policy and of leadership, made the usual wrong
headed analysis of the situation. It was the notion of
revolutionary syndicalism which was dead, and Europe was
plainly told that the British Labour Movement had abandoned
forever whatever illusions it had harboured on this score.
Yet if we were done with the General Strike, we were not
quite done with the miners. Betrayed and alone, as solid as a
wall, and proud and obstinate as only miners can be, they
refused to go back. The vast, unhappy lock-out, with its
burden of hunger and want, dragged on through the summer
to the final surrender when the funds of the Miners Federation
were exhausted. Nothing was gained by it, except the
demonstration of good faith. Shamed and angry on our side, we
salved our consciences by entertaining miners' children in the
homes of the Woodcraft Folk and by collections in our ranks for
relief funds. We attended concerts and listened, unbearably
moved, to the Welsh Miners' Choirs, and we organized rosters
of volunteers to seil miniature lamps in the High Streets.
I served on a Committee, of which the principal figure was
G. K. Chesterton, which set itself the task of drawing up a
monster petition to the King pleading for the nationalization of
mines. It was to be something as spectacular as the Chartist
petitions of the previous century. We collected many hundreds
of thousands of signatures, but they availed nothing against
the social hatreds of the day. The most pleasurable memory of
that work is of Chesterton's immense bulk, a black, cape
covered cloud, ftoating gently down and settling itself with a
faint squeak, as from a deftating balloon, in the presidential
chair. He spoke little, but listened a lot. He had so far modified
his distributist theory as to favour the nationalization of certain
natura! monopolies. He smiled benignly upon us, and his
genial temperament and highly-infectious chuckle got the
committee through its most difficult stages. He 'doodled'
1 06

THE

D E D I C A TED

LJFE

while we talked, on the pad in front of him, and at the end of

o ur meetings I would make a dive for the seraps of paper he had
covered with drawings (often unflattering profiles of Jews)
and show them proudly to my friends.
It was about this time that I lost my friend Roly: he got
married, and patronized me the more when we met, and
smiled yet more blandly as though from the Olympian height
of his new experience he could look down gently on my still
boyish play. I was grieved by that airy withdrawal of his into
a new life : one by one my school friends were becoming lost to
me, absorbed in careers or marriage. Of Speke, who had been
a constant companion when we were together at the
International Tea Company's Stores, I had heard nothing for
two years. When last I met him, he had seemed extinguished
under a growing burden of sadness and dejection. He had
been educated at a Catholic School, and it occurred to me
sometimes that perhaps his sadness came from his inability to
find a way back to his faith. Fri ends ofchildhood must, of course,
grow apart : like brothers and sisters they know each other too
well and cannot believe each other grown up. Behind the
smile they see still the nursery vanity, and behind the look of
courage the schoolroom tears. It was with consternation,
therefore, that I thought of Roly as married : what so soon,
he who was dedicated only to the reform of the world?
In a sense I was reponsible for the marriage for I had
brought them together. ' Poor kid, I think she needs someone
like me to look after her,' RO'ly would say to me in his dreamy
way, a glazed, inward-looking stare in his pale eyes, to which
I always wanted to retort, 'Bosh ! You're so young you need
looking after yourself'-but this was a rather difficult thing to
say to a friend a year or two one's senior. I must have dissembled
my disapproval successfully, for there was no self-consciousness
in their manner when they came hastening to me with joyful
faces one day to say, 'Les, we've decided to get married. We've
come to get your blessing!' I was to be best man too ! Uncom
fortable in the presence of this joy I could only stammer out
lame congratulations to them both. The girl's name was
Rosemary. 'Roly and Rosemary-how euphonious,' I said.
'We have to thank you,' said Rosemary, with a most refined
sweetness of tone. 'An awful lot. If it hadn't been for you we
should never have met. You're really responsible for quite a lot.'
1 07

THE DEDICATED L i l' E

They took me to see the rooms they had rented at the top
of an old mansion. 'Of course,' said Roly, 'it's only a beginning,
Les. We had to take any place to begin with. We'll do hetter
when I get a rise.' Poor Roly had, perhaps, four pounds a week
on which to start married life, and no savings. He had rented
two rooms in the roof for twelve and sixpence a week. Tiny
mansard windows looked out on to a parapet. One could, by
stretching on tiptoe, just look over the parapet wall into the
surprising arms of a mighty cedar of Lebanon which grazed
its fists against the roof. The walls of the flatlet had recently
been painted with that smeary green one sees in kitchens. The
plaster underneath yielded to the touch-a little while, and it
would flake off. The low-ceilinged garrets were airless.
'Our love nest,' they kept saying to me. 'Don't you like ou r
love-nest? Aren't you jealous, Les?'
How hot it would be in the summer, under the slates ! And
where would Roly put his hooks or pursue his studies? Or had
he given them up? I was too grieved to ask.
Roly showed no doubts about the future when he shooed me
off his doorstep after I had brought them home from the
Registry Office. I had been best man. 'You should get married,
Les,' he said, slapping me with violent affection between the
shoulder-blades. 'Nothing like it. You're only half a man until
you're married.' His wife arched her eyebrows at Roly and
simpered. 'vVe should soon know whether he was half a man or
a whole one if he got married,' she said. I could think of no
suitable reply to this beastly superiority and went off down the
street, my back still tingling, full of rage.
I was never east down long in those days, for the life of the
Woodcraft Folk filled my days with an immemorial happiness.
The problems of human nature and destiny which had so
bothered my early adolescence were thrown aside by an act of
will, rather than solved. One was unlikely to know what i t was
all about, I reasoned, and therefore the next best thing was to
come to a working compromise with life. There was one in the
very air we breathed in those days, of which H. G. Wells,
Julian Huxley and a score of others were the preachers. They
believed in an evolving universi. By a cosmic evolution the
earth had been shaped and moulded until it was capable of
bearing life : then, by chemical changes, life had been horn on
the seas of the young planet. This life had passed from the
1 08

THE D EDICATED LIFE

simplest, unicellular forms to the most complex and advanced

form in man himself, a biological evolution which had taken
countless aeons of time. But evolution was not finished because
man had appeared. Now it was at work on his social, political
and cultural forms. The morals and societies of men were as
much obedient to evolutionary laws as the body itself: thus
progress was the law of the whole cosmos. It became possible
to imagine the very principle of evolution in the universe (a
principle we did not dare to describe as God, for that would
have been old-fashioned) as working within us, individually
and collectively, and pushing us on to some future when a new
and more perfect race of men would come to be. This Hegelian
pantheism (though we did not call it that either) had taken the
place for most of us of the Christianity we had learnt in child
hood. Even the disturbing doctrines of Marx and Freud had
themselves an evolutionary justification and could be fitted
into this new frame.
My interest was more than subjective : I was seeking a creed
I might teach. I called the first educational programme I
produced for the Woodcraft Folk, The Child and the Race, and
wrote in it: 'On the basis of biology and evolution is built the
philosophy that underlies both our educational methods and the
charter of the youth movement. We believe that man must use
himself consciously as a tool of evolution. That is, he must
regard evolution as a process that touches him and his kind
intimately, and that we are masters of our fate only when we
assist our own becoming, and the evolution of the race . . .
For three years or more I had been taking biology classes,
mostly under Gordon Ellis, and had reached the stage of
dissecting frogs and rabbits, and I was reading exhaustively
about evolution : now I began to teach, too, taking classes of
Woodcraft leaders, in several parts of London, in evolutionary
studies, which I see by my notes included discussions of religious
. and social evolution, and eugenics. Science and evolutionary
studies dominated the first educational programme : historical
and socialist studies were almost absent. The title of the
programme, The Child and the Race, suggests that we took
aur eugenic role more seriously than our social-revolutionary
o ne.
What strikes me about all this to-day is its irrelevance. It is
doubtful if man is physically evolving any langer, it is certain
'

x og

T H E D ED 1 CATED LIFE

that it is a dubious intellectual trick to apply the doctrines of

physical evolution to human societies and cultures. Even if
man is still evolving, no one can say with any certainty what
acts of man will aid his evolution or hold it back (assuming
it possible to do either) . Science, by relieving man of certain
physical responsibilities which machines and instruments can
hetter shoulder for him may, for instance, be anti-evolutionary.
Unless man gives up thinking and moralizing, and goes back
to an animal state in which the pure law of survival can
operate again (if it ever really operated as Darwin supposed*)
then he must make decisions upon quite other grounds than
'evolutionary' ones. Evolutionary theory is irrelevant to the
human situation, and only spurious philosophizers pretend
otherwise.
Yet though this doctrine in those days provided us with an
intellectual justification for our existence, the real consolations
for our doubts, fears and disappointments we found, not in
evolution, but in the warm life of movements. We were
inveterate 'j oiners' and drowned our individual despairs in the
larger hope. Everywhere in Europe it was the same j ust then.
Into socialist, communist and fascist parties, and youth
movements by the score, men were projecting their personal
hopes and fears, asking of them the miracles they had ceased
to expect in their private lives.
As I look back those years of woodcraft activity, years that
the locust ate, flow together and merge : one camp is very
like another, and the camping years become one long camp.
Only the sites changed, and what flawless ones we chose: their
very names are immemorial England !-At Princes Risboro'
under the enormous cross carved on the chalk hillside of
Whyteleafe; by Magpie Bottom in the downs above Shoreham
Valley; by the Hammer Ponds, near Horsham; dose by
Steyning, or underneath Chanctonbury Ring; within sight of
Stonehenge; staring at the Long Man of Wilmington; on the
banks of Coniston Water; a walk from the Swannery at
Abbotsbury; under dreaming Christchurch Minster; at
Timberscombe by Haslemere; at Hangman's Gove; in the
meadows of the giant curve of the Wye, under the brow of
Symons Yat; or in that tiny hamlet with the Norse name of
Garth, high up in the Welsh Hills, not far from Llangollen,
*See The Meaning qf Human Existence, 1 949, Chap.

1 10

2.

THE D E D I C A TED LIFE

looking across the rich Cheshire plain on which in the early

mornings all the douds of England lie pillowed.
So many things were ardently begun, and with such hope
for their effect on the world, that only a dullard could have
escaped exaltation, or the illusions of grandeur. Numbers grew
slowly, yet we did not care, for there was that in the atmosphere
of the movement which called forth a sacrificial activity. We
were spurred on by the pride of being against the conventions,
and so many of those against which we rebelled then have now
been overthrown, that it is difficult to remember any langer
what we were excited about. But sunbathing, co-education and
vegetarianism ( we collected many touches of crankiness)
brought us under fire. So too did our eccentric leather-fringed
jerkins and shorts. That there was something freakish about us
in the eyes of others was to us a sign that we were ahead of our
time. And in some things that was true. I find it odd
now to remember that I had to attend meetings on many
occasions to refute the allegation that it was immoral for boys
and girls to camp together, or for boys to run about without
their shirts on. I enjoyed the denunciation of detractors on those
occasions, though I remember it with nausea now, for no one
can be so priggish as the self-righteous reformer; to my followers
my Machiavellian argument was that opposition was good for
us, it drew us doser together, gave us something to fight for,
and cut us off more sharply from the society we detested. We
constituted a very self-conscious and intolerant elite.
I and the new movement were fortunate in my father's
success in Fleet Street. He was doing well, after years of
patient struggle, and I was doing well with him, writing for
many provincial papers as well as earning commission on the
advertising I brought them. I was able to buy a caravan which
I planted in a paddock on the hills above Shoreham, dose to a
farm where many woodcraft camps were held, and so provided
myself with a base for writing and country life whenever I
could escape from town.
We moved into a new house which my mother prodded my
father into buying by instalments. It stood dose under the
spire of Christchurch at Forest Hill. It was a matter of import
ance to me that from the window of my study-bedroom I
could look up at the same tall spire of warm stone at which
Richard Jefferies must aften have gazed from the windows of
III

T H E D E D I C A TED

LIFE

his unde's house in Sydenham (though as a matter of fact

Jefferies loathed church bells and steeples ! ) Round this spire,
in the hot summer months, the wild swifts swirled. They would
wake me early in the morning with their screaming, and I
knew without opening my eyes whether the day was fine and
sunny or dull and cloudy, for on sunny days they would rise
in their superb ftight until they were dots in the blue, and their
screaming would come remotely down from the high, pure air
in the hollow of the sky. But on dull days they scythed below
the clouds, harvesting the insects round the eaves of the
houses, and I could listen to the rush of their bodies through
the garden. My heart beat with painful excitement when I
first heard them in May, and when August came, if I was not
away, I would begin to ache with the expectation of their
departure, and watch despairingly for the day. Their mad
diving and whirling, like mobs of screaming schoolgirls playing
touch, mounted to a crescendo as that day approached. One
morning I would fail to hear them. Perhaps I had slept through
the stirring of their rabble at dawn. If it turned out that they
had not yet gone, my lease on happiness was extended for a
day.
The bay window of my study-bedroom looked down on a
small garden like the corner of a wood. At the end of it grew an
immense ash tree. On either side of it waved and shimmered
the pollarded poplars and lindens. Close to the house was a
mighty old pear tree reaching out blossom-laden limbs to the
windows in spring. Always anxious to trace in the town pattern
before me the lineaments of a vanished countryside, I fancied
I could reconstruct, by the age and position of the scores of
apples and pear trees in the gardens before me, the lines of the
orchard I had been told our rows of houses had displaced. My
mother loved the little garden, and still further thickened its
bocage hy planting apple trees, plum trees and currant bushes.
By the time we came to leave the house the wood or orchard in
the garden had so multiplied its branches that a thick wall of
greenery spread itself below my study desk. The pear tree
produced small sweet pears which tended to fall prematurely,
so that when, in the hot days of August, the house windows and
doors were open wide, one could hear through most of the
rooms the soft thud, thud of the ripening pears falling on the
lawn.
112

THE

D E D I C A TED

LIFE

The pleasant old suburb where the house stood has nearly
vanished now. The bombs have hastened the erosion of time,
that's all, shattering the old villas, and uprooting the twisted
thorns and gnarled old apple trees. The old brewery, dean and
spacious like a Brauhaus in a sunny Bavarian town, and fragrant
with hops, became first a milk depot, and then a fortified
ARP headquarters which a landmine almost destroyed. Bombs
shattered the station clock tower, which once looked down on
the machinery of the hydraulic railway which hauled goods up
from New Cross along a cutting once-once!-a canal. Now
blocks of fl.ats, as tall and as alien by night as the wall which
shuts China away from the barbarian, run in wonderfully
curving chains across the suburb : the regularly spaced lights
of their echoing corridors and balconies shine like the illum
inations of a sea front. To look down on them is rather like
looking down on the Gemeindebauten ofVienna from Kahlenberg.
But when we moved there the roads immediately around us
were unpaved, and grass grew along the verges under the
chestnut and lime trees; a farmhouse still stood under a high
wood of ash and poplar. Rain made muddy rivulets along the
road edges and a sweet, earthy smell came up from the yellow
soil. In the autumn, when I ran for my train, I would kick the
spiked green chestnut husks fallen overnight: they opened like
silk-lined jewel cases and scattered their polished gems across
the roadside grass.
Where once Richard Jefferies lived and looked out on
meadows, are now colonies of prefabricated houses as squat
and grey and ugly as Tartar villages. It was dose to these that
I had offered me, once upon a time, a cottage, lang since
vanished, set in a paddock of its own lined by hawthorn hedges
which bloomed as festally as those of Combray. I could have
had it for five shillings a week, and turned up my nase because,
though it had water, neither gas nor electricity were laid on.
But what a cottage ! I stared from its windows across the deep
railway cutting to an unspoilt wood of oak and hornbeam
which shut out all but the drifting chimney smake of the villas
beyond. Starling-haunted elms rose to the south. Indeed,
there was not a sign of human habitation to be seen anywhere,
except the tip of Christchurch spire, where the swifts and
carrion crows wheeled. It was country still, this forgotten
paddock where the baker grazed his horse, the lost labourer's
H

13

T H E D E D I C A TED

LIFE

cottage standing on its edge, surrounded by neat little squares of

potatoes and carrots, and rustling fences of hollyhocks. The
unattainable wood opposite was the haunt of tawny owls;
down the wooded sanctuary of the railway embankment the
kestrels glided daily, taking the route the bombers were to
follow: I might still see above, on days of miracle, a heron or
a swan flying across to the distant Ravensbourne : the cuckoo
never failed to come.
There were then heights on the Sydenham ridge where I
would stand, in full summer, Crystal Palace behind me, and
find it hard to see a house, so immense was the umbrageous
sweep of black and billowing trees from ridge to horizon.
Norwood had still some of the majesty of a forest, and as for
the vaies and meadows of Dulwich, with their high elms and
solitary farmhouse, they constituted the handle of that green
sickle which, by way of parkland, golf courses, still virgin
cemeteries, deserted brickfields, allotments and the recreation
grounds of the Ravensbourne, swept almost unbroken to
Lewisham Obelisk. In pre-war days I watched this unique
heritage being devoured, portion by portion, by owner
occupier villas. It is surprising how much has survived. Forest
Hill is still a suburb of steep hills and footpaths, clambering
past islands of trees, where rises the fume of rain-warm thickets.
It is by their narrow ways that you can come suddenly to
eminences the stranger would not suspect existed, which yield
astonishing vistas over the brickdust haze of London to the
heights of Hampstead and Highgate, vistas which at night
reveal another Pacific breaking its glittering, phosphorescent
waves against the dark, unknown archipelagos ofhouses.
Perhaps it is not astonishing that here in this wooded land,
where I might see flocks of peewits, or watch tree-creepers and
woodpeckers harvesting up and down the trunks of garden
trees, that I dreamt even of nightingales. In my bedroom
which looked down on the pear tree I woke from an early sleep
to hear loud and pure in the garden below me the song of a
nightingale as I had aften heard it, waking in my caravan, at
Shoreham. I hurriedly thrust on a dressing gown and, muzzy
with sleep and astonishment, ran down under the pear tree to
listen to this miraculous visitation. The song, alas, was coming
from the loudspeaker of a house which stood at the end of the
garden, and presently the voice of a cello joined it. The B.B.C.
I I4

T H E D ED I CATED LIFE

had just discovered that the nightingale had entertainment

value. It was just one of the odd things that do occur that I
had in any case probably heard this same nightingale many
times, for the B.B.C. had set up their recording van in the
wood on the edge of which my caravan stood.
My happiness was greater, too, in these years, because my
first hooks were published. A slender volume of poems, con
taining 'The Song of Creation,' was published at my father's
expense, a belated, but generous twenty-first birthday present.
He was wisely sceptical about the point of publishing this
immature verse, but as proud as I was to see my name on a
volume towards which the critics were charitable. The
handbook for the Woodcraft Folk which I had been writing
in the early morning was at last published, and continued for
many years to bring me in small sums by way of royalty. The
greatest discovery of those years, I suppose, was that it was
both practicable and possible to write hooks and get them
published, that this profession was not an esoteric mystery.
Since the burden of organizing the growing camps of the
Woodcraft Folk often exhausted me, for some years in succession
I took part of my holiday walking alone, in the spring, in the
West Country. The village streets of Stowey and the hills
around Alfoxden, where Coleridge, Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy had walked were objects ofpious pilgrimage, and
the 'Lorna Doone' country too, though I had long tired of
that romance. But I sought a deeper layer of English life,
something about which I knew very little, but thought very
often, the England which belonged to the green roads which
led to Stonehenge and Avebury, the primitive settlements of
Glastonbury where I found the ruined monastery, and Joseph
of Arimathea's thorn flowering dose to the tower on Glaston
bury Tor, and still farther west to Athelney (on the road to
which a pint of rough Somerset eider once knocked me dean
unconscious) , as far in the end as Tintagel and the dolmens and
standing stones, and the long and the round barrows of
Cornish moors. My destination was often a tiny cottage in a
walled orchard garden in South Devonshire. On my first
visit, across the moors by compass and map, I lost my way
when night overtook me miles from my destination. The
twisting, sunken Devonshire lanes swallowed me up and took
me deceptively here and there. Trees overhung the lanes, and
1 15

T H E D E D I CA TED

LIFE

it was only by the stars that I could guess my direction. I

walked for hours under a velvet May sky, hope abandoned of
finding the place. Then, quite by accident, I came face to face
with the cottage, recognizing it, even in the starlight, from the
photographs I had been sent. I rattled the gate. The spaniels
barked, and drowsy heads seemed to come out of all the
windows at once. I called out my name, and they shouted
that they had been expecting me and began a confused account
of how they had put up a hammock for me under the apple
trees. I found the hammock and unrolled my sleeping bag and
crawled into it. The silence was itself a bed. Above me apple
boughs wavcd stiff and white : I could smell the invisibly
rioting garden, the wallflowers and the hawthorn, and rising
up strangely with the whisper of its lapping and surging
the peaty smell of the river, evoking the leats on the modrs
by which I had walked. Far above the apple boughs I could
pick out of the May sky Cassiopeia and the Plough, soft in their
lustre and tried to count the stars of the Pleiades as they
glinted like the scales of a goldfish rising and falling in a dark
pool. From the stars came a barely perceptible dew, and when
I woke in the morning to the wet, winking light of sea and
moor, my thick untidy mop of hair was soaked with dew, and
the blanket was pearled with it. Later that morning I went to
find the river I might have fallen in the previous night. It
came down deep and fast between rocks from the moors, and
no sun touched it. Never had a river looked so deadly and so
cold; the current was almost too much to swim against, but I
had a reputation to maintain, and with children shouting along
the bank, and the spaniels making whining rushes across the
otter-printed turf at the rat-smelling water, I battled with all
my strength for a hundred yards upstream before I admitted
defeat and turned on my back, and let the current take me, and
bump me through peaty, rock-bound pools and thrust me on
to pebbled shoals. There the spaniels, fretting and yelping,
would dash to me, nipping hold of my hair or ears to pull me
out, for they had a fixed obsession that I was drowning when I
rollcd about in the water and grew most unhappy if I did
nothing to reassure them.
What extraordinary dogs they were, the first I had ever mct
with a real feeling for the uncanny. In a deep wood wc passed
through, lay a giant tree, stripped ofits bark, crouching whitely
I t6

T H E D ED I C A T E D L I F E

i n the subaqeous green light like some monster o f prehistoric

times lifting its snout to sniff the leaves of its neighbours. The
two spaniels hesitated long before the tree hove in sight, and
had to be driven along: they displayed split minds and
bodies : their forepaws scrabbled energetically at the ground
as if they were about to rush along merrily at any moment,
but they gazed at us with haggard eyes and their hindparts
dragged in paralysis dose to the ground. The sight of the naked
tree itself was just too much for them. They turned tail and fl ed
whimpering. Commanded to stop, they crouched shivering
among the leaves, their backs to the terrible enemy. To pacify
them one wrapped a coat round their heads and carried them
past the tree, and once across they scampered away with joy
and relief after one backward, furtive glancc of apprehension
lest they might be pursued. Their superstitious awe was not
confined to this fallen tree, for which there was the excuse that
it looked like a creature. They equally disliked giant sun
flowers which drooped and nodded large baleful eyes at them
over garden fences : a glance from one such eye was enough to
send them yelping for home. At the side of the !anes lay many
black tar barrels, on the ends of which were pasted white
discs with a black circle in the centre. Two of these, side
by side, looked at a distance like a pair of rolling nigger
minstrel eyes. And so the spaniels concluded too, for they
would only pass them if picked up and carried with their faces
averted from the horror. I knew what their feeling was, for I
myselfwas never able to pass Vixen Tor, on the moors, without
a sense of being watched wherever I went, whatever I did. For
me, indeed, the Tor was that 'rock on the heath fashioned by
weather,' of which Pater wrote 'passing . . . which one ex
claimcd involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this
Place! Numen inest! '
My friends were pacifists, and pacifism had an extraordinary
affinity for vegetarianism, and so we lived on enormous wooden
bowls of garlic-flavoured salad, and messes of lentils and
roasted pine-kernels garnished with leeks. We thrived. Through
them I met the most remarkable character of the neighbour
hood, a rag-and-bone merchant called Joe. He was a rag-and
bone merchant less out of poverty, as far as I could see, than
out of love for perfect freedom. What hetter than to rattle
through Devonshire !anes for endless days in a pony and trap?
I f7

THE D E D I CATED LIFE

He was a Tolstoyan 'simple-lifer' and could quote from his

master's ethical works with an astonishing fluency. He came in
his trap to visit me, for I had been announced to him in
advance as a fellow Tolstoyan : was I not a youth leader, poet,
pacifist and even, a good deal of the time, a vegetarian? Almost
the whole bag of crankiness in fact, enough to delight Joe's
heart. And he stood there befare me, browned by the sun,
hatless, bearded, with deep-sunken eyes solemnly scrutinizing
me, pumping my thin hand up and down with a massive paw
grimed by his trade, and greeting me with a deep bass voice.
His torn shirt blew open to his waist, his trousers gaped, and I
was overwhelmed by the sight of a hairy mat stretching from
his throat to his belly. So taut and curly were the hairs that I
felt certain that if ycu fell against them you would bounce off
as from a wire mattress.
His smile of delight changed to a look of stern reproach.
'I naaver 'spected thaat of thee, maaster,' he said, with a
sorrowful shake of his head as he stared down at my feet. I
stared, too, but could see nothing wrong with them except that
they were much smaller than his. My eyebrows went up
questioningly.
'Leather!' he whispered with horror. 'Tha'rt still partly
clothed in the skins of wild beasts slaughtered for thee. Thee'm
not yet weaned of thy cannibalism-thee must excuse me young
maaster, but I do call that sort of thing cannibalism.'
'Well, damn it man ! ' I cried in exasperation, staring at his
feet in turn. He silenced me by holding out his foot. He was
wearing slippers of bast and canvas, like any Russian moujik.
I was so infuriated by this impertinence that I cried out, 'Your
horse, you old humbug, your horse. That's got leather harness ! '
I might have cheated a t chess, for the effect it had o n him :
his face darkened sullenly and h e pouted like some over
sensitive child pained by a rough word : he was clearly aghast
at my lack of tact or good sense.
'Let dog eat dog,' he said, obscurely, shaking his head and
refusing to meet my eye. 'Thaat's all I have to say in answer to
thaat. Let dog eat dog. We are men, thaat's how I think, young
maaster.'
Somehow a great hole had been punched in our conversa
tion, and we both stood awkwardly regarding each other.
Presently he brightened.
I I8

THE D E DI C ATED LIFE

'In time I hope to teach thee, young maaster, that all life is
sacred. Nothing must be slaughtered to feed or clothe thee.'
He waved an expansive, grimy hand at Devonshire. 'Nature
provides sustenance for all we in her bounteous plants and
fruits, in her lush pastures and fertile vegetation. Do thee
come one day and visit me that I might teach thee how to live.'
With that he left me, shaking his head sadly, and with yet
another minatory glance at my sinful leather shoes, and mount
ing his tall trap went flying down the hill amid a jangle and
crash of iron as loud as a naval bombardment, waving his whip
and whooping to the children who went shrieking along with
him.
I visited his home, which was really an encampment, and
listened to a long dissertation on the necessity for man to find
some means of eating grass. Look what it does to sheep and
cattle, he said. It makes the very finest beef. And in England we
have the finest grass; sun and rain conspire to make it so
God's gift to Englishmen. If we could find a way of digesting
it and making it palatable then we could continue to live
almost without work, for one garden lawn would keep a man
in grass for a year. He had tried chopping it very fine, mincing
it, boiling it both alone and with other vegetables, but so far
the dream of his life had not produced anything edible, but
only the most nauseating messes, resembling freshly laid cow
pats. But I listened to this eccentric dream only absent-mindedly
for my eyes were popping out of my head at his home. Joe
certainly lived as he pleased. I had never seen a crazier assem
bly in my life than that which he called his bungalow. It was
fenced from the lane by a parade ofbedstead ends, some brassy,
some rusty, other of chipped white enamel, but no two alike.
The gate consisted of the wire mattress of a child's cot slung
between railway sleepers. Over it rose an arch of hoop iron
upholding a square frame of rough wood on which the name
'Happy Days' had been worked in large, cheap blue beads.
Almost against the gate was the dump ofhis trade : bedsteads
predominated, but there were old cars, stripped of everything
of value, hulks of carts, broken parts of engines, smashed tools,
rotting buckets and baths, cast-iron grates, coils of barbed wire,
petrol cans and swarms of worn rubber tyres which Joe used,
Jack of all trades that he was, to sole the boots and shoes of the
villagers.
11 9

T H E D E D I CATED LIFE

The bungalow itself! One room was a dismantled baker's

van in which it was impossible to stand upright, the second a
contraption of old boards roofed over with feiting. The living
room looked as though it had once been a sports pavilion, for
it had a veranda (on which we took herb tea) and a coat of
arms adorned a shield above the porch. The four rooms en
closed an inner court paved with cement and containing a
shower-bath contrived from a white enamel cistern and the
rose of a watering can-one pulled the chain and hoped for the
best. This cramped hole Joe labelled 'solarium' and there, for
several hours a day, sun or no sun, he would disport himselfnaked.
This did not end the eccentricities. One room-a guest
room, Joe insisted, which I could have for as long as I liked if
I would help him with his researches on grass-was a furniture
van standing away in the paddock. It contained a bed on
runners, some shelves, a water jar and a cracked washing bowl .
On the shelves were the works of Ruskin and Tolstoy, and the
Bible. The van was screened at its opening by a canvas fiap,
which could be drawn-up during the day to serve as an awning.
By the side of the bed on runners hung a plush hell rope, which
one could imagine last used in the drawing room of some
Victorian home when the lady languidly rang for tea. Now it
served a most alarming purpose : one tug on it and the bed slid
out into the sunshine. I was told it did this inadvertently same
times, without any initial tug, so that one woke from a dream of
falling asleep on a scenic railway to find it a fact. If, once in the
open air, it rained (and in Devonshire it seldom stopped) one
hauled on yet another rope, and, the theory was, one could
draw oneself back to safety.
Lumpishly in the middle of the paddock stood the cabin of
a dismantled army lorry, complete with leather cushions and
steering wheel, looking for all the world as if the field itself had
been provided with a control cabin and was driving furiously
towards the tors. This was the summerhouse, and discreetly
among the elderberry bushes, where the rabbits scraped,
an old hansom cab housed the Elsan water closet. Crooked
tin smoke stacks protruded from every room, daubs of paint of
every shade adorned the walls, and even fiowers were growing
in pots which had once been ornate milk jugs or bedroom
utensils. Its craziness was almost genius, and it was with childish
glee that Joe told me how he had fought 'the council' when
! 20

T H E DEDICATED LIFE

they wanted to condemn his paradise. But for a simple-lifer

it must have been the most complicated paradise one could
have invented.
I laughed at Joe. Yet it was an uneasy laugh : he was only
living the things so many of us said. Vegetarianism was in the
progressive air in those days, like sunbathing and the necessity
to eat salt with iodine in it. I attended the lectures of Dr.
Saleeby where both were urged upon me. Joe reduced all these
causes to absurdity by his anarchist extravagance about every
thing, but causes they remained, and much serious debate
was given to them in the left circles in which I moved. New
food shops catered for fantastic new-life tastes : there was even
one where my brother and I drank a mixture of malted milk,
hot water and olive oil, which was held to have the most
beneficia! effects on one's colon and nerves. Healthy life
literature became a flourishing industry, and for all I know may
still be. I used my authority to introduce vegetarian diet in the
camps that I ran, and the last time I visited one such camp I
was lecturcd (the wheel bad turned full circle) on the dangers
of eating common salt. Naturc, I was told, provides all the
salt that man's body needs in vegetables.
In those days many of us held the view that to take life at all,
even animal life, was evil, and only the fact that so many
causes alrcady engaged my attention prevented me from giving
my aid to anti-vivisectionism and anti-vaccinationism. Irony
apart, what disturbed me, and what was never far from
the fears of most intelligent yong people then was the
dread that war might come again. We were so angry with
popular complacency that nothing would satisfy us but the
grandest of moral gstures-total and immediate disarmament.
Only in this way, I said (at first) , was it possible to make a
moral demonstration to the entire world of the futility of mass
slaughter as a means of settling the disputes between nations.
It was in those years that I came imaginatively to under
stand the First World War. About it I was less ignorant than
most fellows of my age, for I bad given two unusual years
of voluntary service in war hospitals, beginning when I was
twclve years old.* In the medical hospitals I bad seen the
mentally and physically broken, the men with shell shock,
trench feet, trench fever and war psychoses of every variety
*The story is told in The Living Hedgt.
121

T H E D ED I C ATED LIFE

and had been so frightened that I abandoned these men, with

whom I had no common language, for the soldiers in a surgical
hospital. These were for me the real 'wounded Tommies' which
the newspapers had made familiar. They limped, they had
bandaged arms and heads, they smoked cigarettes all day long,
and talked rationally. They did not, like the victims of war
psychoses, roll their eyes and grimace at you, or throw fits on
the kitchen floor, and curse God. There were men like Brunt,
from a Cornish fishing village, who became my friend, and got
up a collection for me when I lost a ten shilling note belonging
to a soldier, and Eagle, the Staffordshire miner, who had lost
one leg and propelled himself savagely and bitterly about the
ward in an invalid chair, exactly as I was to see Charles Laugh
ton do years later in The Silver Tassie. I ran messages and did
all sorts of humble and menial services for them, happily,
and as I see now free from any absurdly inflated feeling about it,
but responsibly and keenly, arguing that since I was too young
to fight, the least I could do was to help those who had fought
for me. If I hero-worshipped them, and it is difficult to hero
worship a man in bed whose urgent natura! wants must be
attended to, it was not as individuals, but rather as symbols of
England whom it was a good, wholesome boy's instinct to
serve. It seemed to me that, just as I was glad to be 'doing my
bit,' so they ought to have been proud to fight the Germans and
to help England to win. I could not understand why they
laughed at me. I could not understand why they were glad
to be idle in bed, wounded no matter where, nor why they
spoke in a defeatist fashion of the war, which most of them
were convinced we had lost. It awed me to divine within them
a dark world of catastrophe from which I was excluded by
much more than the circumstance that I was simply a boy.
The nurses, and the old sweats who did fatigues in the hospital,
were just as shut out. I divined this closed world of experience
in the wounded German soldiers who, with faces scored,
white and thin like bunches of unscrubbed celery, crawled
feebly out on to the balcony next to the wards I worked in.
And I discovered it too in the absorbed, unhappy bearing of
the exercising German officers, one of whom, a mad U-boat
commander, who used to walk round in small circles with a
Bible in his hands, escaped and committed suicide while I was
there. These precocious experiences marked me indelibly with
122

T H E D E D ICATED LlFE

the mystery and terror of war and, added to home experiences;

the grievous separation from my father, the raids, the food
shortages, the eternal poverty, they weighed me down while
still a child with a spiritual burden which made my heart ache
uncomprehendingly. Now I read all the war novels and auto
biographies as they appeared, and learnt with shock and
terror, what was that incommunicable life the soldiers I had
served and loved had lived.
I read Remarque's All Q_uiet on the Western Front, Graves'
Goodbye to All that, Tomlinson's All Our Yesterdays, and Henry
Williamson's The Patriot's Progress, in some ways the best of his
hooks. Yet it was Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War which
was the real literary miracle of those days, perhaps the one war
book destined to be immortal. It so excited me that I sat up all
night to finish it: I recall the astonishment of discovering that,
at the end of a day of blood and mire, Blunden remembered
that he was, just that day, twenty-one. He was already a
veteran. I was filled with anguish that he should have lived
through this inferno at an age I had already passed by three
years : I was even envious. How little my own life so far had to
show! Yet there was that in Undertones of War which moved
me as much as his personal history: it was a poet's book: he
saw the war as a poet: 'the poetry was in the pity.' He rose
spiritually above his experiences as Remarque, for example,
was incapable of doing. There was no personal complaint, no
bitterness, no hatred, no hysteria. How was it possible, I asked
myself, for a young man to triumph so sublimely over so
bloody a baptism that one never felt the presence of a forced
sentence, a romanticized memory, or the aggressive intrusion
of his egoism? The attitude of personal affront which character
ized so many war memories was completely absent. His
objectivity of vision-one must tell what one sees, Peguy
wrote, above all one must see what one sees-was the more
difficult for me to accept since I personally, who had suffered
none of this, was as full of partizanship about war as a Suff
ragette about votes, and knew it. Blunden taught me that
which I was as yet reluctant to learn-that one could accept
even the worst that life had to offer without that sickening
egotistical protest which I myself was always making about
everything.
These were suspect reactions on the part of a militant
1 23

T H E D El>I CATED LH' E

pacifist, for such I had become, but the war hooks, even when
they did not feed my anger, fed my propaganda, and in my
recoil from war's horrors I thrust the Woodcraft Folk into
dose contact with all the pacifist elements we could reach.
The No More War Movement and the Independent Labour
Party in those days enshrined between them the pacifist
tradition of the Labour Movement, and men and women like
Fenner Brockway, Reginald Sorensen, Lucy Cox and Walter
Ayles had much influence upon us.
I tried to turn the movement into a dedicated group of
war-resis.ters, prepared to meet any personal suffering rather
than break faith, and aur magazine began the serialization of
Reginald Stamp's 'A War Resister in Prison' through which
we tried to teach the technique of war-resistance. Reginald
Stamp wrote for the benefit of learners that, 'The first stages
of war resistance are difficult. Officers and private, doctors
and chaplains, kind people and foul-mouthed men, strong
personalities and physical bullies, each in their turn try and
break one's spirit and determination by kindness or brutality.
To the man who has no firm foundation for his faith, the trial
is not easy. It is not difficult to be brave in crowds, but it is
hard to be isolated and stand alone. Those of the Woodcraft
Folk who are determined not to be soldiers (and I trust they
are many) , I would urge to rely upon themselves and the
qualities within them, and not upon movements, for in the
last analysis it is an individual quality.' How well I succeeded
is shown by a copy of the Woodcraft Folk's Journal*, which
reached me while this was being written, containing a bitter
personal record of a member recently imprisoned as a con
scientious objector.
Yet a pacifist crusade was hard to reconcile with our work
for children and young people. My conscience told me that we
ought not to try to commit them to acts of martyrdom they
were too young to understand. I detested this exploitation of
the generous loyalties of young people when I met it in other
bodies, particularly left-wing movements, and had no wish to
repeat it in my own. And there was, too, a very rapid slurring
of our pacifism when it came up against the Russian Revolution.
Admiration for this was universal amongst us. No one doubted
then that the October Revolution bad moved world history
The

Helper Jan. 1 95 1 .
f 24

T H E D EDICATED LIFE

forward. To our consciences, if to no one else, we privately

admitted that revolutionary acts against capitalism might be
justified where imperialist war was not, a thesis which the
pure pacifist could not possibly accept, since the doctrine that
evil means corrupts good ends is the very root of his philosophy.
And because we could not decide that the Russian Revolution
had been a mistake even though force had been used in
attaining it, we could not easily remain pure pacifists. During
the General Strike Sidney Shaw and I had been quite certain
'
that if it went on to violence we could not stand aside: and if
we did not dwell on the violent aspect of it, we certainly
wanted it to go on to revolution. And so our effort to take a
strong moral stand about war was hedged round with so many
reservations that it was, to say the !east of it, disingenuous.
We were often ashamed of our hesitations and contradictory
views. The disaster of war was so horrifying that we felt we
ought to be able to make up our minds to oppose it, and it
alone, without qualification. Yet wc could not. History would
not let us. It cannot be said that we got clear guidance from
the older men who had suffered for their pacifism in the First
World War. When they elected to go to j ail rather than fight
there had been no Russian Revolution : they could un
equivocally condemn all war. But since the end of the war they,
too, had collected an ambivalence of attitude, privately feeling
that revolutions and wars against foreign intervention were
justified, where imperialist wars were not. Many pacifist
j ournalists published long justifications both of social
revolution
'
and of pacifism.
My friend Joseph Reeves, to whom I owed so much, in
those days the greatest moral support to the movement I had
founded, was an enthusiastic admirer of what we all then
called 'the Russian experiment' and one of the pioneers of
Anglo-Soviet friendship through the agency of co-operative
travel. If men like Johnstone filled one with dismay, and made
one doubt the spiritual resources of the Labour Movement,
the courage and honesty of Reeves restored one's confidence.
He gave himself unstintingly. It would be true to say that
socialism represented for him the secular Christianity for which
so many of his generation were looking-the translation into
the field of politics and social service of the moral precepts of
C hristianity unencumbered (as he many times asserted) by
1 25

T H E D EDICATED LIFE

dogma and superstition. All those for whom this was the
situation, for whom that is the problem of faith had been
jettisoned in favour of the act of service, had been transformed
into a secular priesthood. They were marked by an ardent look,
a firm step, a conviction of vocation. It became possible to
pick them out in tram or bus by the look in their faces. Reeves
was one of them: indeed he still is one of them: high-spirited,
generous, eloquent and sentimental. An elementary schoolboy
he had educated himself upon those giants of our day, the
iconoclastic Shaw and the idealistic Wells. Shaw triumphed
in him for the sake of conversation, but it was from Wells,
whose lower-middle-class heroes he resembled, that he received
his philosophy of life. It was nothing less than the sweeping
belief in the powers of scientific man to remake the untidy
world into something shining, bright and dean. He would
often talk to me in Wellsian terms. 'Just fancy, Les, that
scientific man can talk to anyone in any part of the globe. The
world grows smaller and smaller, communication and travel
easier, but the planet is still patterned into the raging little
nation-states it acquired in the days of horse-traffic.' And,
waving his hand at South London, at its mess, squalor and
ugliness, 'We can make beautiful aeroplanes, and amazing
dynamos and find out even what's in the atom, but we haven't
done a single thing about this. But we could, if we wanted to
just look at it, just look at it.' And as the tram rattled through
Greenwich and came to Deptford creek, I looked at it, as I
had done many times before, with a sick and sorry heart.

CHAPTER S EVEN

Death of a S p ace Seller

owards the end of the twenties many old-established

provincial newspapers disappeared. They
were bought up by chains, or amalgamated with their rivals.
The newspaper industry, in the blessed word of those days, was
being 'rationalized' . It involved an alteration in the status of
the 'London Manager', such as my father was. The old,
independent newspaper placed its London representation in
the hands of some person like my father whom it could trust,
and relied on his personal efforts to bring in advertisements.
The representative was presented with noteheadings bearing
his name, paid a retainer which varied with the standing of the
paper, and drew ten per cent commission on the advertising he
brought in. To secure a reasonable income he would probably
have to represent quite a few papers. My father had twenty
in his 'stable' at one time. If you walk down Fleet Street to-day
you can still see, on many a street doorway, the long lists of
papers represented by industrious and hopeful canvassers.
As a matter of course each representative circulated the
advertising agencies with promotion material and made
routine calls on them to press the interests of his papers. But
that was not how the business was done. The real work lay in
finding out what agencies were planning new campaigns for
some popular product, or what old lists were about to be
revised, and at that point to press the claims of the papers.
When a provincial paper found its way on to one or two
important campaign lists, other business would follow without
canvassing, for the one list would serve as the basis of many
campaigns. And this meant personal contacts, preferably in the
127

Tindependent

DEATH OF A SPACE-SELLER

pub round the corner. There was no substitute for them. Even as
a small boy I had waited for my father outside the King Lud or
Peele's or Andertons while he finished his beer and his business,
and steered him home if both had been too much for him.
It was a world of the most glorious freedom. So long as one
kept the business managers of the provincial papers one
represented contented by the flow of business, there was just
no one in the world to ask you what you did or where you went.
It was most easy to become a bar-leaner; to vanish into the
world of cafes and pubs after one had read one's morning mai!,
and to emerge from it again to complete the evening mail
at about half-past five. And then if the call of wife and home
was not too powerful there were the lights of all the pubs for
miles around to draw one to them, in the hope of picking up
just this or that snippet which would yield new business. If one
had no stomach for this convivial life, one's career as a rep
resentative was very much barder: if one was too fond, then
it was all over by fifty. The entry of the newspaper combine
into this Dickensian world meant new pressure for results. The
'
combine, with i ts shining London offices, its batteries of
secretaries, and its general staff of executives, injected into the
field the brisk young go-getter who could not afford to spend
much time leaning on bars, or to return to his office the worse
for wear. He sought to get his results by an American quick-fire
salesmanship based on circulation returns, sales analysis,
market research and the new psychological palaver by which
advertising was everywhere striving to raise itself to the status
of a profession : and he was morally supported by the vague
yet ominous power which always attaches itselfto any combine.
I have no doubt that my father, given his temperament, was
very much ill-at-ease in the face of such confident and know
ledgeable young rivals. But his sense of inferiority must have
been a personal o ne, based on his ignorance of the new jargon,
and not a business one. It was still, whatever the authorities in
the textbooks might say, most important of all to be known
as Freddy and slapped on the back and taken into the saloon
bar for a quick one. How to Win Friends and Irifluence People
would have been his vade-mecum, if he had ever come to hear
of it. In this individualist world he had no peer, but his intensely
personal success had no place in the world of the combines
when they fell on him and his papers.
1 28

D EATH O F A SPACE-SELLER

Within two years m y father lost both the provincial daily

papers he represented. They were bought up and amalgamated
with rivals whose advertising figures he had actually
managed to beat. Therefore at the very height of the success
for which he had struggled all his life, his work was dashed
down, and he lost perhaps five-sixths of his income. In his
easy-going way he had omitted to press for three-year contracts
with his daily papers and so, when it came to it, he could be
given about six months' notice. He was, when all this happened,
offered a post in one of the combines at a very much smaller
income, but he regarded this (l am sure) as such a demotion
that, however financially necessary it was to grasp at it,
pyschologically he was incapable of doing so. His despair and
bitterness were too great even to permit him to speak ofit.
I look back now and search his gentle and kindly face and
seek to understand him. He was in those years, when he was the
age that I am now, a very successful man, earning far more
then, when money was worth much more and taxes were light,
than I have ever managed to earn with my pen. He was
proud of his success. He believed that there was an essential
justice in life which made sense of the world : success came from
hard work, and that was all there was to it. When he discovered
that disaster came from success-the advertising success for
which my father was responsible was one reason why rival
papers were anxious to buy up those he represented-and
that life was both unjust and cruel, he could not go on living.
He had begun life as a half-timer in Leeds, a boy with
almost no education, who acted first as a printer's devil, then
as office boy in a newspaper, and who became in time a
canvasser for advertisements, then a circulation manager, and
filled every post with zeal and friendliness. Bad luck dogged
him. His first really important promotion was to the post of
London Manager of a newly-founded paper, The Southern
Daily Post: this was in I 9 I I when he was still in his early
thirties. To take up this position he left a job on the Sheffield
Independent and brought us all to London. But in the very
week in I 9 I I that the new paper was launched there was a
railway strike, and distribution was so badly dislocated that
the new paper was killed at its birth, and my father was left
high and dry in London with no experience of the great city.
We moved into the cheaper house in a poorer road in which
I 29

D E A TH OF A SP ACE-SELLER

I was to spend all my boyhood. My father scoured Fleet Street

and got some work on the Scots Pictorial. He began slowly to
establish himself, though I doubt if in those years he was
earning more than three pounds a week. And then the
Great War came. This first thrust his business into a decline,
and then caused him to enlist in the Army under the Derby
scheme. For a long time the family of four which he left
behind-shortly to be increased to six!-were living on a
separation allowance of about two pounds a week, and keeping
up that iron front of respectability characteristic of Yorkshire
folk-dean clothes, bright shoes, washed faces and plenty of
porridge. When the war was over my father had to begin
where he had left off, but now he was approaching forty, and
his responsibilities had grown, and the competition in the
Street, to which so many soldiers had returned, was if anything
keener than ever. Yet within seven years he had done it: he
had got to the top of the only tree he could climb, had bought
himself a new house, a car, and taken a trip to Madeira to
ease off his blood pressure and his drinking.
One's parents are always enigmatical. Even long years after,
the springs of their behaviour seem mysterious. Mine were not
literary characters who left letters and diaries which minuted
the heart's disorder. One has only memories to work on,
and these do not reveal any estrangement between my mother
and father. Not even the difficult times of their forties, when
mother began an exhilarating and unexpected public life on
political and hospital committees, and the children were
escaping in every direction into private interests and careers,
and father was more and more wrapped up in the night life of
the Street, and home therefore much less like home than it had
ever been, eaU to mind any breach. There must have been
difficult times : the virtues of our youth are sometimes the
vices of the middle years : now that these had come, the
pride, zeal and conscientiousness in her home which mother
had displayed in her youth, looked more like anxiety
neurosis.
The children were a disappointment to a father wedded to
doctrines of success and hard work. My young sister, possessed
of an independence equal only to my own, had gone off and
contrived an unhappy marriage with an unemployed man,
which haunted us all. I was estranged from my father by the
1 30

DEATH OF A S P A CE-SELLER

movements and causes of my generation which were all

noisy, arrogant and incomprehensible to him. I was as full of
theories as a dog of fteas. One of them concerned the parasitic
nature of the advertising business. My prickly idealisms had
caused me to believe that all work except that of the primary
producer was parasitic. If one did not grow food or produce
goods then one lived off someone who did : it was morally
inexcusable-and still more so if one lived well while the
primary producer lived badly. I brooded heavily over
the parasitism of the writer and artist and doubted the
morality and relevance of art while people went hungry. I
understood theoretically that man did not live by bread alone,
but my growing materialism made it difficult to admit that
anything except the production of food, warmth and shelter
could be accepted as primary activities. Advertising was
obviously low down among the secondary pursuits : a charge of
sometimes dubious propriety on the cost of goods. Where then
did the space-seller come in?
I have no doubt that I was didactic at boring length about
this, and in a way must have infuriated my father. But my lack
of enthusiasm for advertising as a career was so manifest that
morally my position was becoming untenable. If I did not like
my father's business, the honest thing was to leave it and make
my own way. I was moved to this too by being called a 'waster'
by one of my father's secretaries because I so obviously hung
on to my father's tail : this stung me into a desire to show what
I could do unaided. It was just after the peak of his success, at
the beginning of his downward run, that I went, and by one of
those disastrous intuitions which do occur among people very
dose to each other, choosing for the time of my going the
moment when he first received an intimation that he was
likely to lose one of his pa pers. That I should abandon hope of
succeeding him in the business at the very moment when its
precariousness was revealed to him infticted on him one of
those psychological wounds which the young so carelessly
visit on their elders. I wake at night still and grieve over it.
Yet my decision to leave had been based not only on a
calculation about my fu ture, but on a feeling of illness which
I confessed to no one. I was torn between running a movement,
trying to write, and the routine tasks of my father's business.
I decided to abandon the least important so that I might do
131

DEATH OF A S P ACE-SELLER

two jobs well instead of three jobs badly, and it was

typical of me that I abandoned the only one which brought
me in any money. And though pleased at giving up a
field of worry in order to write, I was not worldly-wise enough
to see that I now became much more accessible to the mave
ment I had started, and had elected myself unpaid national
organizer. As it grew by my efforts it encroached still more and
more on the time I ought to have set aside for earning my
bread. The folly of this free-lancing was screened from me
at first, for my mother and father were still providing
me with a home : even if I did not earn much money, I knew I
should not starve. My father just grunted and shifted uneasily
in his chair when I told him I was going: he did not ask me to
stay, and was impatient both of explanations and apologies.
'Writing makes a good stick but a bad crutch,' he said, with
an air that meant he had decided I was past talking sense into.
'You've made your bed, and you must lie on it. But you'll
learn, you'll learn ! ' And he sucked gloomily at his unlit pipe,
troubled, shy, enigmatic, and testily unwilling to meet my eyes.
His prophecy of failure moved me less because by a stroke
of good fortune I was, in my first flight into freedom, introduced
to a Harley Street psychologist whose knowledge was far
superior to his ability as a writer, and wrote for him some
half-a-dozen popular talks on psychology for the radio, and
then followed it by putting into shape for publication the
vast, untidy wads of notes and case histories which he had
gathered over several years. He was widely read in history
and philosophy, and our many talks on the chapters of his book
revived most powerfully in me the interest I had taken in my
adolescence in problems of human destiny. I was now to begin
to read more methodically under this stimulus, and tried to
bring my reading into some relationship with Marxism. This
work took me almost a year and so in one way or another I
earned more money in my first year of free-lancing than I had
earned in Fleet Street, and was privately very elated.
Yet all elation vanished in the face of my father's Freudian
wish to die, that baffiing decision of his to turn away from the
world which had failed him. If only he had had some other
interest-music, reading, or movements-he might have been
saved, but his business was his life and to take it away was to
deprive him of his will to live. In face of the misery of this
1 32

DEATH O F A S P A C E -SELLER

there were weeks when I could hardly work and my own sense
of illness increased unbearably. My father moved in a vicious
circle: he drank to excess to escape the misery of contemplating
a future in which most of his income would have vanished :
but the more he drank the less easy he found it to screw
himself up to the task of beginning all over again : if that was
impossible there was only one thing to do, to cease as soon as
possible to be sober. We were grieved and shocked for my
mother in this dilemma, but my own sorrow was even greater
for my father, as I saw him reaching the situation when his own
horror at himself made him reach out still more quickly for
oblivion.
We were helpless : we never knew how or when he would
come home. We fetched doctors to him and they barked gruffiy
and formally at him and told him of the consequences to his
arteries, liver and brain. 'There's such a thing, you know, sir,
as alcoholic poisoning.' We read warning articles from news
papers to him, sought his friends to intercede, and tried to
persuade him to enter a home for a time. My married brother
sent him little notes beseeching him to remember the family,
but he pushed them aside unread in his wretchedness. At first
there was something very strange to us about the onset
of this savage drinking: all we could say to him was that he
would ruin himself by it. He had kept secret even from Pantlin
that he was already ruined, that within a year his business
would be finished. The facts came to me at first by rumour
and were confirmed by letters which fell out of his pocket
when I found him lying on the front steps unconscious in
a puddle of whisky and broken glass. Later I shook him
conscious in his armchair and shouted through his stupor:
'You're trying to kili yourself, father. We love you, we love you,
and you have to stop, for all our sakes.' How terrible it was to
have to shout one's love ! When my words penetrated there was
a panic of enlightenment in his frightened wet brown eyes
which told me that he knew hetter than I did to what he had
come, and had gone over this thing a thousand times already
waking sober in the small hours. I sat crying tears of pity and
rage, watching the look die as he fell unconscious again. And
after that when I met him out I could not help but notice
what in a sense I had refused to believe in up till then, the
growing decay in him, the bloodshot eyes, the mottled cheek,
1 33

DEATH OF A SPACE-SELLER

the stubble on his scabby chin in the morning because he

could not steady himself enough to shave. He looked like a
tramp and walked with the funereal shuffie of an old man.
Dear God, how I wanted to save him, but in my grief and
shame I could not bear to stay at his side.
Mother read in a newspaper about a firm which produced a
special mixture for the cure of alcoholics. They were most
discreet. They corresponded with you under a plain envelope
and promised confidence. We talked despairingly of this and I
went to visit them and came home with a quantity of brown
powder rather like snuff which we had to boil and then let
stand till cold, by which time a clear golden liquid like cold
tea had formed. This we had to strain off and bottle and
administer, from time to time, in very small quantities to the
food or drink of the patient. The liquor had a faintly nauseating
odour, and I shuddered to imagine what it would taste like neat.
We started by adding imperceptible quantities to the tea
and coffee my father drank, and even added some to the
whisky bottle which was always in his pocket. Gradually the
dose was increased. It happened to be one of my father's hetter
weeks and he was more wise as to what was going on in the
world. At first he thought it was the taste in his mouth, or bile,
or an unclean saucepan, but then it began to dawn on him that
this was not the case.
'Something's wrong with this,' he said one morning, deeply
suspicious. 'It tastes funny.'
'Go on, you're dreaming,' mother replied, with altogether
too light and amused an air. 'With all you drink it's a wonder
you have any taste left.'
He could not very well deny that. It was not the sort of
argument on which he could embark with profit, so he said
nothing but watched us with morose and bilious countenance.
He began to sniff at food before he ate it, and often left it
untouched, and we dropped the drug off for a day or two and
then returned to it again when we thought he had forgotten. He
was puzzled to explain to himself these sudden onsets of bad
taste. It was, in a sad way, funny.
'There's that taste again,' he said one morning at breakfast.
It really was amazing that he could detect it so easily.
'Stop making a fuss about nothing,' said mother sharply,
annoyed that he should be so acute about this while the rest
1 34

DEATH

OF

A S P A CE-SELLER

of his life was falling in ruins about him. 'If only you paid as
much attention to everything else ! Anybody would think you
were being poisoned.' And as she gazed at him tears suddenly
started in her eyes, and she turned her head to hide them.
But he was obstinate and irritable and refused to eat any
thing, and stumped off with bloodshot eyes in a pretence of
injured dignity.
One Saturday night I found him on his knees looking under
the sideboard. He had learnt that mother took the whisky
bottles she found in his pockets when he came home at night
and hid them in the most unlikely places. Locked up in a
scullery cupboard were twenty or thirty of them. Dad was
hoping that one or two might be found under the sideboard.
He was deeply embarrassed at being found in this position, and
even his smooth bald head began to flush. He murmured that
he'd dropped something.
'Want a drink, dad?' I asked.
He nodded, but regarded me with suspicious surpnse, for
the family was always steering him away from it.
'No one minds you drinking. lt's when you do too much,'
I said with the bright insincerity one reserves for sick people.
I fetched the bottle of doctored whisky from the kitchen and
poured him a dose, taking one myself . for the sake of
appearances. I sipped mine and privately thought that mother
had overdone it. Father took his with eloquent eyes. He took
a gulp and then with a roar spat into the fire.
'Poisoned !' he shouted.
He smelt the remainder of the drink and pushed it away
with aversion.
'It's not poisoned,' I said wearily. 'It's doctored. Something
to give you nausea for alcohol. Not a very bright idea, but you
brought it on yourself. If you were sensible you'd take a course
and cure yourself.'
Father glared at me from his chair.
'Poisoned,' he repeated.
He spat into the grate again. He struggled up to go for his
coat in order to walk down the road and buy some more
whisky. I knew what it would mean and put my back to the
door.
'If you'll go to bed,' I pleaded, '1'11 make you some tea and
bring it up, and you can sleep the week off. Look at you, you
1 35

D E A T H OF A S P A C E - S E L L E R

need it, you're trembling where you stand. I'm not going to
let you out.'
I tried to make my anxious face resolute, and stared angrily
at the doormat rather than at the pathos of his defeat. The
trouble was that I could not bring myself to be angry. Jf only,
I thought, I could work up one of the terrific tempers of my
boyhood and frighten him in to what we talked of euphemistic
ally as 'pulling-himself-together'. The little notes my brother
sent him used to say 'Dear dad, For mother's sake you must
pull yourself together' . But the very pi ty I had for him made
me powerless. Putting my back to the door was pure
bravado : had he insisted on going out I could not, for love of
him, have struggled with him, and added one more indignity
to those he was piling on himself. I hoped he did not know
that I was trembling too. He looked at my resistance in guilty
astonishment, and went shaking to his chair again, tears
starting from his eyes.
' Prisoner,' he said, in a voice full ofself-pity. 'Like a child.'
One morning in February he would not wake, and when it
was manifest that this was something more than a heavy sleep
we sent for the doctor. It was the expected stroke. 'It will be
a mercy if he does not recover,' the doctor said. 'He will be
completely paralysed. That's not something your mother
wants to have to face.'
My brother and I watched at his bedside, sometimes
alternately and sometimes together, listening to the rasping
breathing for more than twenty-four hours. Outside, the wet
and dreary February day with a sky which was neither cloud,
nor air, nor water but only what H. G. Wells once called a
'chewed-up bit of fourth dimension', died slowly on us and the
lamps were lit along the road, and the yellow light scribbled
tendrils on the pavements and lit glittering caves in the privet
hedges which the wind shook. Now that my father was dying
and one would never again address another word to him, or
hear him speak who hardly ever in his life had spoken harshly,
all was mysteriously changed. In spirit he was gone from the
world as he wanted to be, because at last he knew it for the
cheat that it was. Yet moment by moment his ruined body
conjured up the strength to continue its astonishing fight with
the angel of death, and this too ennobled him. It seemed a
last chivalrous gesture to put up a fight to hold that which he

1 36

DEATH OF A SPACE-SELLER

so much wanted to surrender. I could not yet feel sorrow,

indeed held taut as a string by his breathing I could not even
think: my ane emotion was relief that it was over for him, and
the issue at last decided for all of us after months of suspense.
One could not but be awed by this sudden devastating blow
conjured out of nowhere, like the sword of God, as if someone
had cried, enough ! enough ! a truce had hetter be called.
A glassy fatigue overcame me, listening to the hoarse
breathing that was slipping slowly into a death rattle. Even
resting for a while at the other end of the house I seemed to
hear him still, and was screwed up with waiting. And when
the end came, with what a great sigh he became silent.
My mother was shocked, not only by grief, but by her
half-formed understanding that he had died because he
wanted to. 'It was toa easy,' she said through her tears.
'I did not expect him to go like that, not saying a word.' A
marriage is a partnership, and theirs had run for nearly thirty
years, and now the senior partner had bolted without a word,
leaving all the responsibilities to her. My mother's over
conscientious nature was shocked by this : she would have
conceived it impossible on her side to go off and die with a
chaos left behind her. 'I would never have left him,' she said.
'But perhaps it was God's mercy in the end. He could not have
gane on for lang like that.'
When I saw father laid out on the white satin of his coffin
I felt cheated toa. He looked so cairn in death, the signs of
dissipation gane from his parchment blue skin. His face had
resumed that solemn gentleness which youthful portraits of
him show, and the lashes which rested on his cheek were far
toa lang and curling for a man of fifty. At that moment no
being in the world seemed so remote and incomprehensible
as the man from whose loins I had sprung, and who had
carried offwith him the secret of his utter desperation.
To the funeral came scores and scores of his Fleet Street
friends. A pile of wreaths were raised to 'Freddy'. I can see his
friends still in my mind's eye running and even leaping across
the gravestones to take a shortcut to the graveside as the
cortege approached : as I watched them from the carriage
their stealthy, absorbed, hatless rush reminded me of nothing
so much as the respectful swoop of press photographers at the
critical moment in same royal ceremony.
1 37

DEATH O F A SPACE-SELLER

When all was over and I drank port with my brother and
sisters and uncles and aunts in the dining room at home and
talked of the future, I learnt the full truth of the situation.
My father's life insurance just about covered the residue of the
mortgage on the house. My mother would have, when all had
been settled, hardly a couple of hundred pounds or so. I saw
with a shock that new responsibilities were going to fall on my
shoulders, and did not know how I was going to meet them. I
made the decision to go back to Fleet Street and rebuild my
father's business. There were still papers left capable ofyielding
three hundred pounds a year, I thought. But I was too late.
Even on the day my father died agents anxious to take over
what my father had left started to pull the wires, and set
the telephone bells j ingling. By the time that I arrived on the
scene, the succession had been disposed of. There was no
opening for me in that world any longer: and there was no
escaping the fact that we were poor again. 'It was a pity he
made all that money,' my mother said. 'We should have been
hetter offifwe'd remained as we were in the old days.'

CHAPTER E I GHT

Euro p ean Pers p ectives

he effort to find a post in order that I might give more

T help to my mother and my brother and sister still at school

brought home to me the full extent of my economic worthless

ness. I was twenty-five, and trained for nothing. My only
qualification of a saleable kind was that I could write, but
even in this field my experience was freakish. I had not trodden
the routine mill as reporter either on a provincial weekly or
London daily. The hooks I had published were not of the
kind to rouse much attention.
It so happened that the newspaper amalgamations exactly
coincided with the opening of the world slump which was to
rage with such fury as to change the history of great nations.
The closing down of London and provincial papers threw out
of work many experienced journalists who, like me, had to
resort if they could to free-lancing. I had become one of these
unemployed who were eligible for union but not for state
benefit, tasting the bitter fruit of unwantedness and dying a
little from it every day.
In face of the mounting unemployment figures in all branches
of my profession I despaired of getting any kind of job within
my range. Prospects abroad were no hetter and emigration was
out of the question. Without the aid my mother received from
the Freemasons, and I from the National Union ofJournalists,
it would have gone hard, when the bottom was falling out of
everything, for all of us. In this situation mother decided to
take in lodgers and for the next three years medical students
provided her with her main source of income. Of course, I
was not idle: I worked a great deal longer at my desk than
1 39

E U ROPEAN P E RS P E CTIVES

most employed men, and spent my evenings lecturing and

speaking, often without pay. I was determined that my
writing, which was all that I had got left to support me, should
get me out of the mess I was in, if nothing else could. The
practice of writing articles and stories on speculation and
sending them round to one editor after another was a hopeless
one. It was no use congratulating oneself on the occasionally
accepted piece when, because of the pitiless bombardment of
rejection slips brought by the rest, one was depressed to the
point of suicide. I abandoned this futile game in favour of
something more systematic. I tried to cultivate the journals
'
which had asked me to write for them : I put up ideas, and only
if they were accepted and an article commissioned went on to
write it. This meant that, for earning purposes at any rate, I
no longer tried to write for any highbrow publications and
went instead for the bread-and-butter jobs. So it came about
that I went to Ramsgate, where an elementary school was
teaching cookery to boys, to write an article entitled 'Do Boys
Make Good Cooks?' I travelled to Poole to watch schoolboy
excavations of a Roman pottery. My article was probably
entitled 'Schoolboys Dig Up History'. I went up to Liverpool
to write about a Florence Nightingale of the slums, a woman
teacher so aghast at the disorder of the lives of her pupils that
she installed baths for them, and places where their mothers
could wash their clothes. Interviews were the fashion in
journalism just then. One interviewed famous clergymen on
the prospects of English football, and English footballers were
asked to tell the world why they believed in God. And this
vein in the press I managed to exploit for a while. J. B. Priestley
provided me with an interview in which he denounced the use
of great works of literature merely as the raw material of
grammar. A phrase of his to the effect that 'a poem was not
like a suitcase which any schoolmaster could unpack at will,
and make an inventory of the contents' must have been worth
at least ten pounds to me. I went to talk to H. G. Wells in the
flat he occupied not far from Baker Street Station. But it
turned out that he talked to me. He stood with his back to a
bookcase and piped away at me in his thin, squeaky little
voice-absolutely wrong for a great man, but just right for a
Kipps or a Polly-in what was really a lecture on history,
of which the moral was that we should not personify nations.
1 40

E U R O PEAN P ER S P E C TIVES

'Russia is not a person,' Mr. Wells said. 'Russia is a huge

country with a great diversity of climate, peoples, languages,
methods of prod uction and cultural tradi tions. Yet'-and
here he wagged his finger chidingly at me-'people still
persist either in regarding Russia as the wonderful, energetic
prophet of a new order or as a wicked and malignant con
spirator. Such a way of thinking is perfectly idiotic, and in the
end is bound to lead to idiotic, monstrous and cruel proceedings
such as boycotts, wars, blockade and the rest of the foolery
that is the lifeblood of international politics.
'Children are much more interested in the story of human
adventure and discovery and human achievement. They are
much more interested in the way of life and the hunting,
pastoral and nomadic and agricultural stages of man's history,
than in the elaborate, bloodstained twaddle of kings and wives
and princes, campaigns, annexations and national prestige
with which we try-despite their wholesome, instinctive
resistance-to fill their minds to-day.'
The phrase 'elaborate bloodstained twaddle of kings' went
winging round the world : it was especially popular in the
United States (since failure to include republics in his con
demnation mightily pleased them) and I am most grateful to
H. G. Wells for letting it fly, especially when I recall that it kept
me going for a month or two. The most pleasurable of those
interviews was the one I had with G. M. Trevelyan in his
Cambridge home : he was then Regius Professor of History. We
spent the day talking history : I quite forgot that I was visiting
him merely in the course of a journalistic assignment, and he
never once mentioned it. In the excitement of arguing with
him the theories of history I overlooked even the necessity of
taking notes. And so when finally I left him, it was to firid
myself in the train, my head buzzing with ideas, but without a
single note. All the way down to Liverpool Street I tried to
put down exactly the sequence of our talk, and to leave out of
it as much of my own share as I could. I typed it out the same
night and sent it to him and received back so generous a letter
of praise that I kept it many years.
Similar assignments took me to such places as the very
modem school run by Bertrand and Dora Russell in Hamp
shire, where the front door was opened to me by a very naked
little shrimp, and I now recall only one conversation with the
J4. 1

E U R O P EAN PERSPE CTIVES

great master which was on the subject of religious instruction.

They did not, he said, give any nor did they make
any propaganda against religion. The children were free to
believe what they liked. But they did point out that whether
one was religious or not might easily be governed by the
chemical constituents of the body. For instance the chemistry
master had demonstrated that consumption of a certain
quantity of a chemical (which he named, but what I cannot
now remember) , produced a profound religious melancholy
followed by symptoms remarkably like religious conversion.
I puzzled over the logic of this pedagogy for many years until
I finally decided that it had none. Yet at the time, deep in my
own atheism, it had seemed a most significant remark. The
difficulty began when one applied it, so to speak, in reverse
were certain chemicals capable of increasing one's atheism,
or of making one a poet?
In the summer of the year my father died, while brooding
over a savage ant battle on the steps of the rockery, I decided
that I would write a novel. A successful novel might get me out
of my economic misery, even an unsuccessful one might bring
me a reputation. Though the plot of a novel of invention was
turning in my mind, I felt uncertain of my ability to create and
believed that I had to deal with that which I had lived through
myself. A novel about my own childhood and adolescence
began to sketch itself befare me. I was twenty-five, and only
that year, perhaps because my father's death had cut off
the carefree past so sharply, had it come upon me that, without
any expectation of this thing, there lay behind me, crystal
clear, yet mysterious and moving, my own early youth,
something on which I could look back with tenderness and
sorrow, yet also as upon a life lived by a stranger. It was
rather like that thrilling moment in the dark room when the
image on the negative begins both to form and to become
permanently fixed under the salts of the developer. The
discovery that I had outlived the youth from which only a year
or two ago it was inconceivable I should ever escape was itself
a new birth. Now the task of trying to understand the boy
that once I was and exploring his forgotten being filled me
with such intense excitement that I began next day, without
any further preparation, to hammer out the first chapter on
my typewriter. For nearly two years I worked at the novel,
1 42

EUROPEAN P E R S P E CTIVES

which I called Fugitive Morning, until it took shape in a form

which I felt a publisher would approve. This task was the real
core of my life j ust then, around which revolved all those
desperate efforts to earn money to pay my mother for my keep
and to help to bring up my schoolboy brother and schoolgirl
sister.
In those years, assisted by many colleagues, I was also
busy trying to persuade the Co-operative Movement in
Britain that the Woodcraft Folk, now growing in size and
importance, was something worthy of practical support in the
shape of finance. The circumstances of its foundation
compelled this youth movement to grow up under the wing
of the Co-operative Movement, and now the time had come for
generous support to lift some of the burden from my own
shoulders. But after many years of asking, the mighty
Co-operative Union granted us the sum of [,ro. Then began
years of struggle to get them to increase this paltry sum. They
were almost entirely wasted years, and to-day I regret nothing
more than the time I spent trying to evoke some generosity
towards youth from the officials of the vast and unworkable
co-operative bureaucracy. The really unforgivable thing to
them was that Paul had gone and built up a movement
without asking their permission first, and the hope that they
lived for-which was the reason a senior official once gave me
for withholding help-was that 'Paul would get tired and give
up,' and they could then disclaim further moral responsibility.
Knowledge of this made me fight barder to build up a mave
ment which would survive if I left it: in this, at least,
I succeeded. Alas, it goes on addressing appeals to Co-operative
generosity identical with those I was making twenty years ago,
and with about as much success. Its leaders might spare them
selves the labour of shooting peas at an elephant, I think, after
this long time.
Charity compels me to admit that it was a co-operative
educational scholarship which enabled me to make a visit to
Vienna during the year that my father died, and to listen to
lectures in, of all places, the Consular Academy set up during
the monarchy. I stayed for the first week at Hotel Union in
Doblingerstrasse and so came to walk as in a dream the
city of Franz-Josef, of Schubert and Beethoven, and to take the
air along the Ringstrasse, under the lime and chestnut trees
1 43

E U R O P E A N P E R S P E CTIVES

where once the Imperial guards strode along in red tunics with
gold facings, white leather trousers and j ackboots of shining
patent leather, and were crowned with those high helmets over
which flowing horsetail plumes solemnly rose and fell with every
step. Or once there came-1 could still see the pictures of them
in my childhood hooks-the Hungarian guards with panther
skins thrown over one shoulder and herons' feathers nodding
above their kalpaks. Here was the beginning of the high road to
Asia of which Metternich spoke, and the city was still that
fabled city to which I had lost my heart as a boy. To walk the
white crystal pavements under an electric sun, and with a
light heart, was to hear again in one's heart Schubert's ninth
Symphony, and to stride to its jaunty airs. For the streets were
scrupulously dean and round every lamp post and from
every electric standard which served the grinding little
trams, which ran in twos and threes round the town, hung
baskets of flowers. The gendarmes (of which it is strange to
think that a friend of mine is now chief) had some haughty
resemblance then to the magnificent military of imperial days,
and strode about the streets as if they were aware of it. When
a friend of mine jumped off a tram and screwed his ticket up
and threw it in the gutter in the casual, untidy English way, a
gendarme came up to him, held him by the shoulder and
swivelled him round, whipped out very smartly a neat little
notebook, wetted his thumb as though to a drill, and flipped its
pages from beneath an immaculate rubber band-and pro
ceeded to write him out a receipt for two schillings. This,
understanding no German, and without a due to his offence,
he paid, because he was a stranger and the habits of the
natives should be observed. But when he received with a bow,
heel-dicks, and a salute, the receipt in due order, his annoyance
was so great that he screwed it up and flung it in the gutter.
The hand came on to his shoulder again and swivelled him
round, and out came the notebook and, yes, once again, and
this time blushingly, he paid, double. I am told that the
amount of this fine has now been reduced, in a proper Socialist
spirit, 'in order that the masses may participate' .
Not that we went to see the old Vienna so much as to listen
to the new, which was social-democratic and building every
where the most vast complexes of peoples' homes. The
International Co-operative Congress was being held that
1 44

E U R O P E A N P E R S P E CTIVES

summer and I went to watch, for the first time, the legendary
Russian co-operators in action. They were a disappointment :
they were small, dark, enigmatic little men of the Molotov
stamp, and were concerned only to demonstrate as noisily as
possible their adherence to the Party line. The Communist
Party was then in the midst of its most fierce and intolerant
anti-Social-Democratic hysteria. Every Social-Democratic
leader was the lackey of the boss dass, the Fascist beast or
traitor, the puppet dangled by bloodsucking capitalists : the
boring vocabulary of abuse was exhausted against him. The
true duty of a Communist was to expose him and destroy his
prestige before the working-dass. And so, at this Congress,
before the pained, silent and timid Co-operative bureaucrats
of the world, the noisy and tireless pigmies never ceased to
rise to their feet to protest about some imagined new indignity
offered to them or to the world proletariat. They paid no
attention to the purpose of the Congress, which was to secure
certain measures of international co-operation on the trading
and cultural levels, and defied standing orders to move lengthy
political resolutions. These called on the Co-operative Move
ment to struggle against war, and against the capitalist
encirdement of the U.S.S.R., and demanded the renunciation
of all collaboration with the League of Nations, 'the instrument
of world imperialisms'. They demanded also that co-operators
should 'support all the measures taken by the revolutionary
organizations in the mobilization of the proletariat against the
war danger' ! Was Zelensky, the leader of the Russian co
operators, there? I rather fancy he must have been one of the
bustling mock-revolutionaries putting forward the Party line
with tireless insincerity, and striving to bring about the world
revolution by bureaucratic decree. If Zelensky was not there,
then who was the short, dark, owlish man in spectades, so full
of a fussy determination to be the great Party man? There is,
in the Russian Communist Party, a great tradition of hero
worship. Every subordinate tries to look like his leader. Those
dose to Stalin stand like him, talk like him and write like him.
And by the same token every subordinate of Zelensky was a
miniature Zelensky. They must have found it difficult in the
end to pick out the right man to hang. I was to meet Zelensky
the following year in Moscow. though I did not yet know
that.
K
1 45

E U R O P E A N P E R S P E CTIVES

There was a Workers' Sports Congress going on at the same

time, and Red Vienna decked itself out in scarlet streamers,
and every tramcar rumbled along with a festival bunch of
scarlet ftags on its prow to welcome the proletarian athletes.
The facades of the Gemeindebauten streamed with bunting
and round and round the Ringstrasse moved the giant parades
of welcome-postmen's hands, firemen's hands, railway
workers' hands, children with drums and fifes from the
Tyrolean hills, sports workers in white singlets and red piping,
full bosomed girls with fair streaming hair and white thigh
pinching bloomers, who looked as if they had j ust slipped off
dressing gowns and were about to bathe-all those rising and
falling bosoms devoted only to jumping over high jumps
seemed to me somewhat of a waste-and long columns of girls
and boys in blue shirts and blue dresses and red ties, the Red
Falcons started in Vienna after the Great War by a young
schoolteacher called Anton Tesarek. His movement had
spread over most of Europe and in Germany was said to
be 250,000 strong. I thought of my own poor, struggling
movement, and sighed. In Vienna the Red Falcons received
many kinds of subventions-from the city for welfare work
with children, from the Socialist Party funds for the party side
of it, and from trade unions, too, out of general goodwill. And
so they could afford to run illustrated papers, maintain
permanent officials, and establish training centres and properly
equipped camps. I was very envious of their success. At night
a vast torchlight procession moved from the Town Hall to the
Stadium, a tawny river of light and smoke, as if indeed the
Turks had at last come in to burn the city. I had been told to
seek out Tesarek and had a brief talk with him, meeting his
blue-eyed wife and smiling, radiant little boy, in that wing of
the Schonbrunn Palace which had been given over to youth
organizations. Through him I addressed a mass rally of his
organization from o ne of the pillars of the fantastic Karlskirche
and I began a friendship with Anton and his family which has
survived all the vicissitudes of war, politics and changes of
philosophy. Such international contacts were most heartening:
they showed me to begin with that the 'Labour scout movement'
at which I had aimed in England had proved an enormous
success on the continent, and therefore there still seemed hope
for it at home. It was also a relief to meet men and women
1 46

EUROP EAN PERSPECTIVES

who understood without a great deal of painful and laboured

self-justification what I had been driving at. I had grown so
tired of co-operative officials who imagined that an organ
ization called 'The Woodcraft Folk' must be a branch of the
Carpenters Union. The discovery that Scouting and Wander
vogel principles could be put to the service of the social
revolution was a discovery I was not alone in making, it seemed.
Yet I was forced by accident to play a disingenuous role.
I dared not admit to my Socialist friends that I was lodged
with a Fascist. In Vienna I was the guest of a family whose son
had been received in England, just after the end of the Great
War, as a starving Austrian child in need of help. That I
should come aud stay with them was regarded as a small
repayment for what their beloved England had done for
darling Josef. Darling Josef turned out to be a youth as tall as I
was, who clicked his heels and bowed when he introduced
himself, and then stood very upright again. He was thin still,
with a serious and even solemn face, and instead of looking at
me, he looked along his nose at the distance, focussing upon the
horizon a prolonged and anxious half-smile. It must have hurt
him to maintain it so continuously. He was dressed in Tyrolean
style-a grey suit with green facings and grey long trousers
and-oh, treachery !-the Starhemberg Heimwehr badge in
his buttonhole. I was a foreigner, and out of politeness could
say nothing about it, and after all he was most zealous for my
welfare, paying exaggerated attention to my slightest wants,
and never departing an inch from the excessive politeness in
which his personality was fixed. Did he ever unbend, I won
dered? He was a student at the University, and on vacation,
and he took me about with him. We went to the Prater and
rode on the Riesenrad which broke down when we reached the
top, and so we had a full twenty minutes during which we
could gaze out over Vienna while they effected repairs. Josef
was delighted that we got what he called such 'a good helping'
for the few groschen that we paid. We watched the Wall of
Death show in the park, in which a motor-cyclist looped the
loop in an iron cage, with a bored and even yawning lion
riding pillion, and then went and drank schlagobers in the
gardens of Schonbrunn where I was terrified that Tesarek
might see me on terms ofintimacy with a 'class-enemy'.
Josef and his parents lived in an ancient part of Vienna, not
1 47

E U R O P EAN P ERSPECTIVES

far from the Urania, in a flat in a narrow street where the tall
houses crowded together, their fas;ades grey with antiquity,
the paint peeling off the doors and window frames and a smell
of cooking on the staircases. Yet it was not a slum : the rooms
were large and well-furnished. From the back windows one
had shining glimpses of the canal. In the hot summer days the
narrow street was dark and cool with shade, and the dogs
languished gratefully on its kerb. At night the steeply raked
roofs, drunkenly leaning from age, with here and there a thin
chimney pot sticking up, and everywhere two small lighted
windows under the roof's hood where the students, and perhaps
musicians too, worked as of old in Vienna's garrets, were
like a huddle of witches grasping their broomsticks, whispering
a black mass togcther, and looking down on the street with
yellow eyes.
Josef's fat and jolly father was a pork-butcher and one day,
perhaps, he said, I would like to visit the shop. I could not but
say yes, for he had grown fond of me since he discovered that
my father was in the Artillery during the war, as he had been.
He showed me his medals and albums of photographs, and a
thin young man who looked like Josef stared out of them in a
convict-like uniform. ' Perhaps me and your father we shoot at
each other-boom !' he said, and laughed a great deal at the
thought. Josef said, with a thin smile which showed his teeth,
'we shall go to the shop on a day when we have a ''killings"-it
is "killings" you say, or "slaughtering"?' And so we went.
Behind the dean tiled shop of Josef's father were the slaughter
houses. Even as I arrived, a pig was being killed, and screaming
away into the air. Josef smiled at me. 'She does not want to
die,' he said. Presently there were more 'slaughterings' I was
invited to watch. I had to retreat, handkerchief to nose,
overcome by the smell of blood. Not only the new blood, but
the old corrupted blood of the walls and stones and drains of
the whole place, that slaughterhouse smell which had reached
out to my nostrils in my boyhood from the kosher abattoirs in
Aldgate High Street. It punched at my brain and stomach and
made my head ache. I thought the squealing would never stop
and even outside the sheds the noise of the blood gushing over
the stones into the trough followed me.
A lunch had been prepared for us in the apartment over the
shop : beautifully fried Wiener schnitzel with saute potatoes and
148

E U R O P E A N P ER S P E CTIYES

crisp lettuce, and a slice of lemon, and a battle of wine f'iom

Grinzing where the heuriger had begun. It had been prepared
so lovingly that I could not refuse to eat it, but the smell of
blood was in the air here, too, and I could not go on. 'But you
must eat,' said Josef, quite angry with me at last. 'It is prepared
special for you.'
That day, for the first time, Josef failed me as cicerone. He
left his latchkey in the flat and we could not get in because his
parents had gone visiting. We had to walk the streets which was
pleasant enough in the ordinary way but perhaps from the
pig-killing, I had suddenly begun to run a temperature.
The fever was making me tremble, and I had unwillingly
to confess that I was ill. Josef began to work himself into a
state of anxiety because of his own carelessness. 'l shall
never forgive myself, ' he said, 'never in my whole life that
I forgot my schlussel. Just think, I have never in my whole life
forgotten it until the day that you are ill.' I found it difficult to
talk without my j aw becoming uncontrollable, and my voice
wobbly, and so could not console him. But I did manage to say,
'l can't walk about-we must find a beer garden.' In the beer
garden I could think of nothing my stomach would take
except vermouth, and when I had drunk half a battle of this
I began to fe el hetter. Josef, to o, did well, and his eyes began to
sparkle and his smile grew broader and broader. 'lf it was not
that you are ill,' he gulped, 'l would say we should farget my
schlussel every night and come here. 'At last, rosy and reeking
with aperitif we both went drunkenly home, to find his parents
in. Josef and I were sharing a huge double bed. You fell deep
into a feather bed, as into a foam bath, and pulled a feather
mattress on top. lnto this incubator I sank very dizzily: I
could hear Josef giggling still like a little girl as he undressed.
My fever returned, but the heat of the bed and the vermouth
began to work on me: I ran with sweat. It poured from me,
soaking into the mattress. I felt sure it must have dripped
through to the floor. What effcct it had on the uncomplaining
Josef I cannot imagine, perhaps he also did not know,
for the vermouth he had drunk soon made him beatifically
unconscious of my state. In the morning I was cured,
but too weak to get out of an armchair until Joscf's mother
revived me with a hot nog of sherry and eggs. Then while the
family went bathing I sat and watched, from the window,
1 49

EUROPEAN P ERSPE CTIVES

the pavements baking in the sun and the dogs de-fleaing

themselves in the shade and read through the Tauchnitz
edition of Sitwell's Bifore the Bombardment. Those long sentences,
sweeping in, musical, intricate and poised, like the combers
coming into a bay, werej ust what my somnolence needed.
The Austrian nobility was waiting in sorrow and silence,
but the middle and working classes of Vienna were living an
illusion in those days. The middle dass illusion was that all
was (almost) as it once had been : true, there was a Socialist
administration in Vienna, but it was a temperate and cultured
one : for the rest the shops were gay, food was plentiful, the
opera was superb-as it had always been-and if Vienna had
lost the vast empire of which it had been the crown, it was
hardly to be noticed as one walked about. There were soldiers
in the barracks again, and the police had all the Imperial
splendour and swagger still. To walk along the shaded Ring
strasse, past the museums and art galleries, the opera, the
vast Hofburg, with the spire of St. Stefan rising over all, or to
go and watch the white arab steeds prancing majestically
round the tan of the Spanish riding school was to dream that
all was once more as it had been, or at least that what
threatened it could never overcome this solid world of Christian
culture and bourgeois comfort. Even what had changed
seemed often a change for the hetter, for in the gardens now
taken up by a Russian military cemetery, one could listen to
the best orchestras in Vienna for the price of a cup of coffee,
a very great consideration in a post-inflation world.
The working-class illusion was that with the courageous
social experiments of the Government of Red Vienna, under
the old burgermeister, Karl Seitz, whose biography my friend
Tesarek was to write,* the age of freedom and justice was
ushered in. Karl Marx Hof stood as the symbol of this new
dawn. The children's baths, the creches, the new schools and
hospitals were the mark of its humanity and hope. Even the
violence which had marked Austria since the end of the war
might be forgotten now that in Vienna itself a victory had been
won. The lang columns of children in red and blue marching
the Ringstrasse were a sign that the new world was here.
But as I came away from Vienna there was a new portent
over the frontier. The insignificant and despised Nazis won an
* Unser Seitz: Verlag Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1949

1 50

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

astonishing victory in the September I 930 elections, increasing

their representation in the Reichstag from 4 to I 07. And when
other visits followed the Vienna one-visits to Paris, to
Germany, and meetings with other socialist leaders in my line
of country, including especially Kurt Lowestein, head
master of the Karl Marx Schi.ile in the Red Neukolln area of
Berlin, and Germany's principal social-democratic pedagogue,
I began to broaden my view and deepen my perspective of the
European scene. In Hamburg I witnessed a meeting of the
Communists under the gigantic Bismarck statue. It was quite
unlike the meetings of Communists in Paris or London. Here
was none of the disorder and irresponsibility, the shoving and
cheering, or the slovenly proletarian clothing such as cloth
caps, white chokers and shapeless trousers. In addition to
the faithful standing round at this meeting, listening intently
to the orators, and, as always in Germany, neatly dressed and
wearing bright, clean-laundered shirts and shorts, and as
well-washed as any of the bourgeoisie, the red guards were
drawn up, members of the Communist private army called the
Red Frontfighters League, same with red armlets, same with red
shirts, all with polished jackboots. Under the statue I saw what
was to me the opening of the European civil war for suddenly
with screaming klaxons along stormed many lorry-loads of
brownshirted, j ackbooted ruffians, with armlets displaying the
crooked cross, and a battle o pened for possession of the speaking
site. Then came the police too, and three armies raged up and
down underneath the statue dubbing each other impartially.
The police won, because they were hetter armed, but had
there been fewer of them they would have been forced to shoot.
I lingered staring at Nazi and Communist headquarters
in Hamburg. They were just what I had imagined, from the
war novels I had read, the busy base headquarters of active
sectors of the front to look like. Armletted, uniformed dispatch
riders roared in on smoking motorbikes. Guards stood four
deep at the door and examined passes. Little files of troops
stamped in and out every now and then. Grim, helmeted men
stared down from conference rooms on the busy scene below.
Posters, flags and banners lit up the street with apocalyptic
warnings about the future. There was no difference between
the headquarters save in the colour of uniforms a'nd flags.
One might have used each as a setting for a Ruritanian comic
I5I

E U R O P EAN PERSPE CTIVES

opera, but one could not have used the characters. Anything
less comic in intention than they were, it would have been
hard to imagine. They were filled with a sense of destiny, and
happy to be in uniform. The Germans, who have no sense of
the personally ridiculous, found it all exciting rather than
embarrassing. No one ever sniggered. In Germany it was in
bad taste to laugh at a uniform, even a political uniform.
Something quite mighty was happening to Germany. An
enigmatic quality had crept into the letters from our youth
comrades who were not socialists. In our first contacts with
such movements as the Kronacher Wandervogel and the
Deutsche Freischar in the twenties we felt no doubt at all
that we stood for the same things. We felt drawn to them much
more than to our own British Trade Union and Labour
Movements. We had the same independence, the same love
of the open air, the same eagerness to discuss everything under
the sun. But now they were saying such dubious things that I
was driven to look instead to international socialist contacts :
for we were losing our first and best friends.
'I must say now,' Wilhem Boehme wrote, 'that what struck
me most was the emphatic Englishness of your people with
regard to all international socialism . . . This kind of national
socialism is so altogether different from the German inter
national kind that it opens quite new points of view to me.
Perhaps Germany is a riddle for the other countries, for they
are under no necessity to return from internationalism to
nationalism, while Germany has been dreaming for centuries
of world-brotherhood.'
And from Otto Jordan, of the Kronacher Wandervogel,
came this: 'With no other party has the Youth Movement so
much kinship as with the Nazis. National Socialism demands
that education and politics shall be based upon the inner and
most fundamental qualities of man. It is against crippling laws,
against laziness, against unearned income, against cultural
forms imposed from without. So much I think we can all
accept. There is much here that we miss in other parties. These
human, natura! and fertile characteristics are part of the
conscious German inheritance, formed in past ages. Thus
arises the philosophy of Race . . . One of the most mortal
enemies of race purity is the Jew. It is he who, through
capitalism, interest and freemasonry etc., through international
1 52

E U R O P EA N P ERSPECTIVES

Marxism and materialism threatens the German national

character. Instead of these there must be an economy and
culture which corresponds to the old German customs, religion
and legal systems (instead of the present Roman law) . Every
thing is based on the fundamental blood kinship. lnstead of
parliamentarianism comes the idea of leadership, of the fully
responsible leader. Everything un-German is eliminated . . .
Then comes the thought. This over-emphasis of the Nazis that
Marxists, Jews and others are betrayers, these sharp oppositions,
are dangerous. In principle I am all for understanding between
the peoples; but we have had such unfortunate experiences in
this direction that it is more and more difficult to maintain . . .
Sympathy for the culture of other nations is undoubtedly good,
so lang as it does not lead to neglect of one's own national
qualities.'
We were dismayed by letters like this : the thinking in
them confused us. At same point one could not exactly
locate these German comrades slid away from us in those many
campfire discussions we held together. How beautiful they
were, the youths from the defeated land across the sea, playing
their lutes and singing their songs at our campfires.
The galden down of their lang rosy limbs shone in the firelight,
their fair hair fell in locks over their faces, and each one had a
characteristic tass of the head, like a colt's defiance, by which
he shook his eyes clear. We admired them, but it was their
mystical Germany we did not understand, though we tried
politely enough.
'The Germans are not like other people,' they aften said.
'They need a strong discipline.' 'It is no good judging Germany
by the rest of the world. The Germans were never under
Rome : they have a different history. They do not belong to
Latin Europe.' 'One must think with the blood, by intuition
and longing-it is not what one knows that matters, but what
onefeels.' 'There is something in the German soil which makes
us different-that is why we do not like the Jews who do not
have this quality.' There was much sense in same of it, but it
never came to the point where we really understood what they
were driving at. The dark history of Germany was still in the
future : nothing then had been decided, and not a hair of the
head of a Jew had been harmed. And it did not seem to us,
who were not Germans, that arry nation could possibly in the
1 53

E U R O P EAN PERSPECTIVES

broad light of modem history, accept so menacing a crank as

Hitler. I knew that Germany possessed the most powerful and
best organized working dass movement of the world: of course,
it would fight rather than accept Hitler. To this movement
belonged history, in my view and the Marxist view, and the
marriage of National Socialism and Germany was not to be
thought of. We saw Hitler in terms of a brutal political realism
in fancy dress, but from friends in Germany we heard of him
mostly in terms of a cloudy idealism which dressed him up as
Siegfried. 'Germany,' they said, 'can only have its own kind of
socialism. It must show the world its own way to brotherhood
and unity. We have to make our politics in the spirit of the
Buende-in a longing for the Absolute.' I was quite incapable
of answering in words. What came back to me each time was
the spectacle of the brownshirts and redshirts skirmishing
bloodily and happily under the mighty Bismarck statue, and I
would ask myself-don't they understand what is going on in
their own land?

1 54

CHAPTER NINE

The Leninist Circus

came through Hamburg, on the way to the Soviet Union,

r . Those were the peak years of the Intourist Traffic,
and I, like everyone else, was a most hopeful traveller. The
society we were leaving as we ploughed across the North Sea
was one in which, week after week, the unemployment figures
mounted : huge tracts across the North of England and the
lowlands of Scotland had become derelict humanly and
industrially, even agriculturally. To live in a world where the
most dire want was being answered by the burning of coffee
in locomotives, the ploughing of wheat into the soil, and the
throwing of fish back into the sea, was like living on a lunatic
planet. It was the depth of our despair, the intensity of our
nausea which made the Soviet U nion, with its optimistic
economic expansion and resolute economic planning, stand
out like a New Atlantis of reason and hope.
My visit had been made possible by the help of Joseph
Reeves. He was aware of my own economic plight, and said it
was possible for me to go at a reduced rate in the party his
Co-operative Society was organizing if I was prepared to act as
leader. As I never minded running anything, I said yes delight
edly, and set about raising the necessary {,20. I managed to
do this in the end by seiling the dominion rights of my interview
with H. G. Wells for [, r o and borrowing the rest from a girl
friend. This small debt embarrassed me for years because, try
as I would, I never seemed to have ten pounds in my bank
account all at one time, except on the wrong side. I planned
to write a series of articles on the Soviet Union to pay my
expenses, and to help to keep me through the forthcoming

I in I 93

1 55

T H E LENINIST CIRCUS

winter. But, alas, when I did return it was to an England in the

throes of the worst political crisis in years. The MacDonald
Labour Government had resigned, a new National Government
led by him had been formed and the gold standard had been
abandoned, while the opening shots of a general election were
being fired. Russia was pushed off the front page, and I was
able to sell only a tenth ofwhat I had planned.
Well, there I was, in charge of what the Russians called a
'delegation', though we were appointed by nobody but our
selves, on the good old bourgeois principle that those who
could afford to go, went. I was even promoted by the Russians
to be 'Director' of the English 'Centrosoj us' in the course of a
series of banquets in which we ate too much and drank too
much. It was as a Director of the 'British Wholesale Union'
that my photo appeared in Russian papers, to the annoyance
of those really important English co-operators, who were
indeed directors of something or other, and thought me very
small fry, guilty of an impudent imposture.
A foretaste of the Russian adventure came when, at
Hamburg, a new Russian ship from Leningrad berthed
alongside our own vessel. Those Communists of Hamburg,
who had scrapped the year before with the Nazis, came in
ceremonial fashion, accompanied by banners and bouquets
of red roses and much Marxist rhetoric, to give the new ship an
official reception : the Soviet consul and staff were there too and
somehow when I looked at them it was like looking at the
Russian delegation of busy pigmies in Vienna all over again.
When the new motor ship, the Ukrana, drew alongside, its
rails were thronged by drably clad Russian workers of both
sexes, all visibly excited, and gazing at us with as much
curiosity as we regarded them. We must have been, to their
minds, the first bourgeois they had seen out of captivity for
many years. Not that we felt bourgeois, but we were to discover
that the most ordinary citizen of England, wearing holiday
clothes, enjoyed an undeservedly prosperous air in the Soviet
Union, where clothes were rationed, expensive, and poor.
Indeed, I had brought with me only a sports jacket and
ftannel trousers, which in my penury were all the clothes I
possessed just then. True, I had brought shorts to change
into, because I expected the weather to be hot, but when
I wore them in a Moscow street they drew excited
1 56

T H E LEN INIST CIRCUS

crowds. Workmen and women crowded round me to feel the

material, which was corduroy, and to make rude remarks (I
rather suspected) about my bony knees. They imagined, I
fear, that I had forgotten to put on my trousers, and come
out in corduroy underpants. 'Sport?' they cried, slapping me
on the back. 'Sport?' 'Sport, da,da,da,da, sport !' I cried
back lustily, for unless you were sport it was indecent, it seemed,
to expose your knees in Russia in public. In one of the ban
queting speeches I was always being called upon to make,
I tried to tease the Russians about this, and told them that
I knew of members of a certain Russian religious order
who had asserted that the October Revolution of 1 9 1 7
signalized the coming of the Kingdom of God, when man
would once more be innocent, and walk naked before his
fellow without a sense of sin. They had therefore come naked
into the city to proclaim this new day, and gathered crowds
round them just as my bare knees had done. To escape the
crowds they boarded a tramcar where the conductor meanwhile
holding up the traffic, engaged them in a dialectical discussion
about the significance of nakedness in the proletarian
revolution, and ended by persuading them that though,
theoretically, they were right, until Moscow had been cleansed
and made new by 'the revolutionary will of the toiling masses'
they were liable to catch diseases from the degenerate agents
of the capitalists, who still lurked in the streets. Graciously
they acceded, on ground of hygiene only, to go home and
dress. Then the traffic was able to move again. My Russian
hosts did not laugh and I was quietly taken aside afterwards
with an interpreter and told that I should not say things
which slandered the toiling masses: bourgeois dilettante
inventions such as mine only gave ammunition to the dass
enemies of the U.S.S.R.
The Ukrana, which put this recollection into my head, was
on its maiden voyage. It had been built in Leningrad shipyards
for passenger and goods traffic in the Black Sea, and was on its
way with 500 picked shock brigadiers or udarniki as freight.
This was the reward for their services in the industrial recon
struction of the U.S.S.R. During our absence they were let
loose on England for a day or so, to the astonishment of the
daily press. There was no doubt that they were workers. Their
faces, their hands, their dress betrayed it. Most of them had
1 57

T H J!. L E NINIST C I R C U S

not been outside their country since the revolution, and in what
state they came now ! We were certainly impressed. Jf this was
the revolution there could be no doubt as to which dass had
come out on top. The well-built ship and its proletarian
passenger list were an impressive introduction of the new
Russia.
As our little boat slid gently along the Kronstadt canal,
past the fortress where there had been the famous mutiny of
sailors against the terrorism of the new regime, we crowded
eagerly to the rails to watch the slender golden spire of the
Peter-Paul Fortress, and the great handsome dome of St.
Isaac rise out of the sea. We were at the gateway to the new
land, and present!y docked in the Neva dose to the spot where
the cruiser Aurora had stood when she shelled the Winter
Palace in October I 9 I 7. But my first thought, when we were
set down on the cobbled quays to await the shabby omnibuses
which were to drive us down the Nevsky Prospekt to the
Oktober Hotel, was of the unexpected beauty of this northern
Venice. The gothic of Germany was left behind : here were
long, graceful Palladian buildings, painted often enough in
contrasting reds and pinks, blues and greys, and baroque
churches and government offices, in vista after vista along wide,
tree-lined boulevards which were intersected by gleaming
canals : all was lucid, cool and dear in the brilliant July sun,
and its spaciousness needed a Canaletto to do it justice. It was
indeed as if we were moving into a new intellectual and
spiritual dimate. We soon discovered that Leningrad was not
Russia, but rather Russia's idea of Europe, and it was perhaps
not an accident that the revolution preferred to base itself on
Byzantine Moscow: the abandonment of Leningrad was a
preliminary to the abandonment of the whole of Western
Europe.
At the customs office they had gone through my luggage and
taken out a pamphlet by Trotsky on The Mistakes if the Bolshevik
Leadership and flung it disdainfully into a corner. Why had I
brought it? It was pure cussedness, I think, because I felt even
before leaving England that the full symphony of propaganda
would be let loose against me, indeed Reeves had warned me so,
and I wanted something which would support my refusal to
succumb. Yet when I saw the Customs official, a little ten-a
penny bureaucrat, throw contemptuously away the considered
I 58

THE L ENINIST CIRCUS

arguments of one who had helped to create his world for him,
I was shocked at the indifference it displayed to freedom of
thought and one's debt to history.
We came by hus to the Oktober Hote!. As I was signing the
hotel register my arm was tugged and I turned round and
there by my side was a seedy little man, in a black overcoat,
and two days' growth of beard. He was smoking a Russian
cigarette with a cardboard holder and puffed aromatic
smoke in my face. It was inconceivable that anyone would
know me in Russia. 'You want me?' I asked, raising my
eyebrows in a lordly way. He gave me a monstrous, con
spiratorial wink. 'You English?' he asked in the hoarse voice of
a man who sleeps at night on park benches. I nodded. 'English,
good. You like nice Russian girl? Nice fat loving girl? White
Russian girl good for Englishman.'
My face showed distaste and I tried to shake his hand off
my sleeve. Was this Russia? I did not know what to say.
'With party,' I said, with a grimace intended to indicate that
this was all too public.
'Good. Plenty of girls for party,' he replied in his hoarse,
confidential whisper. 'Plenty, look.' He swivelled me round
abruptly and there sitting on the settee opposite the reception
desk, as placid as cows in a meadow and nearly as huge, sat
six fat Russian girls all looking to me exactly alike. Dazed by
the sight of this fleshy herd, I shook the pimp off and went
angrily upstairs with my bags. Banging against my thigh as I
walked, was the notebook in which I had begun to put down
systematically what I was learning a bout the U .S.S.R. I had
started my notes on the ship because lectures had been given
there by the Communist fraction of the passengers. In one of
them, on the social policy of the Bolsheviks, it had been asserted
that there was no more prostitution in the U.S.S.R. : being
purely an evil of capitalism it had been abolished with it, and
ex-prostitutes now lived socially-useful lives in institutions set
up for their reform.
I was soon to come across a second contradiction of this kind.
In Leningrad we were shown the film, The Road to Life. It is a
remarkable film which describes in terms of the most
tender humanity how a young Russian teacher set out to win
back the besprizhorni, the homeless young vagabonds by which
Russia had been plagued smce the Civil War, to lives of
I 59

T H E L E N INIST CIRCUS

decency and service to society. The film i s instinct with truth,

and when I watched it a warm rush of sympathy overcame
me. If this was the spirit of Bolshevism, then, I privately
admitted, my own criticisms and reservations were petit
bourgeois. We were told that almost no youths were homeless
now, they had all been coaxed or rounded up into reformatory
institutions. Thanks to education in 'the revolutionary role of
the toiling masses,' the besprizhorni were a problem of the
past. There seemed no reason to doubt it. Yet when I went to
Moscow, in advance of the party to arrange its programme,
I saw, slouching everywhere in the most hideous and indes
cribable rags, homeless youths of the type described in the
film. I could never go out anywhere without seeing them, a
scab upon the body of the city, and what troubled me most was
that to the citizens of Moscow they must have been so long
a familiar spectacle that no one noticed them any more. The
good citizens did not raise their eyes at them as they did at us,
but passed them with more indifference than the Londoner
accorded to the street musician. Even a piteous youth I saw,
with a tin in hand, begging from passers-by who averted
themselves from his stink, was not moved on by the passing
policeman. When now I think of Moscow in the August sun,
it is these children I see again, like stray cats and dogs, slinking
in corners, squatting mangily and sleepily in the sun and
delousing themselves, and watching all the time, as persecuted
animals do, for the slightest hostile move from the human beings
who surrounded them. One such wreck lay stretched out asleep
on a park bench, when I passed by with my interpreter. His
body was burnt a coppery black, his long bleached hair was
matted round his skull in the kind of mane which reminded me
of descriptions of Indian wolf children. One outstretched
hand still, in his sleep, gripped a tin. His clothes no longer
resembled garments bought in a shop so much as leaves of
rags secured to his body by string, which the wind blew about,
exposing his lean brown nakedness. 'Come on,' I said. 'l don't
understand why there are all these children like wild dogs
around. Let's ask him why he doesn't go to the authorities.'
The interpreter looked both frightened and uncomprehending,
as if l'd made a social bloomer, and with expostulations of
considerable reluctance came forward with me. But the sleeping
boy had one bright animal eye open : at my resolute step
1 60

T H E L E N I N I S T C I R C US

he lcapl wilh a low moan from the bench, and ran like a
hunted dog across the flower beds. I never succeeded in
getting nearer one than that. The interpreter shrugged her
shoulders and made explanations to the effect that these were
not the real besprizhorni but the children of kulaks who had been
against the regime and would not let the authorities help them.
I did not believe her, but in a general way she was right.
The Road to Life dealt with the besprizhorni problem as it existed
at the end of the Civil War. Those children were dead, or had
been rescued and brought back to society. But the visit to
Russia we were making then coincided with the height of the
war the Bolsheviks were waging against the peasantry under
the title of collectivization. To us, then, collectivization appeared
the kind of economic and social advance the Russians declared
it was, and it is a mark of the efficiency ofth.e Russian censorship
that we travelled twice through the Ukraine without ever
being aware of the frightful campaign against the peasants then
going on. vVe knew there was famine in certain areas. ' Crop
failures' was used to explain the shortage of food in Moscow,
which effected even such privileged visitors as we were. These
new bespriz/wrni were most probably the children of shot or
transported peasants. *
It was astonishing what we saw and excused. The report t
that I edited on my return makes it obvious that there were
many things wrong. It speaks of queues, of 'a real shortage of
perishable foodstuffs' (butter, milk, and vegetables ! ) , of low
hygienic standards in the shops, offood buried under battalions
of flies, of original!y good vegetables and fruit 'in a pulp state'
before they reached the shops . 'The waste must be enormous, '
the Report remarks.
We saw women working everywhere and a woman member
of the delegation wrote : 'We saw young women acting as
street-sweepers, tram conductors, tram drivers, pointswomen
(sitting on an iron stool, or wooden box, by the points, an
iron rod in their hands and protected from the sun by a large
fixed umbrella) , traffic signallers, also women on du ty at
railway leve! crossings. We noticed a woman guard on a train
In

Retour de L' U.R.S.S. Andre Gide gives a detailed picture of be.sprizhorni in

Russia in 1 936, five years later.
t Rus.sia 1931: Report of Two Groups of Co-operators, Co-operative Union Ltd.,
1 932.

161

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

and policewomen, whilst attendants were generally women,

and hefty young women were drilling young men in the Park
of Rest and Culture, or standing on lorries with megaphones,
making speeches, or calling people to meetings. They act as
guides to tourists, interpreters at banquets, and march through
the streets with young men in the shock-brigades. We saw
them marching, shouldering rifles at the head of a young
communist's funeral procession, also acting as coffin bearers
at a private funeral.' Our miner delegate found women working
in the candle-lit coalmines of the Donbas and I saw women at
work in steel-rolling mills, on furnace tapping. I knew that
women had always worked in heavy industry in Russia; the
novels of Maxim Gorki told me no less; and that women's
battalions had formed part of the Tzarist Army-one had even
defended the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks-so this
employment of women everywhere did not shock me. But the
Russians continually minimized it, and made haste to excuse
the employment of women in heavy and dangerous work
against their own industrial code, by saying that it was just
'temporary'. I longed for more frankness.
We saw pitiful things-free markets, of a poverty which made
the Caledonian junk market appear like the Wembley Exhib
ition, where peasant or working women, nursing their babies,
squatted on the ground holding up microscopic scraps or
yellowed meat, or one tiny egg, or, most pitiful of all, a woman
patiently holding up one worn satin-covered shoe. 'What on
earth can she get for one shoe?' I asked derisively, then flushed
with shame, for the other was still on her foot. She was seiling
the shoes off her feet to live.
I wrote a report on hotels, for The Tourist had asked me to
do so, and said, ' Even in the first dass hotels one may find
bugs, or rats, and one is certain to find beetles and flies . . . the
third dass hotels are definitely bad as regards food, service
and deanliness, and since these are the only ones within the
pocket of the bulk of the tourists, there will have to be wholesale
reorganization.' I did not tell the story of how, in the best
hotel in Rostov, every time I opened my bedroom door at
night and switched on the light I was puzzled by a brown
flash and rustle. This seemed to be an optical and aural illusion.
One night I tried to track it to its source. I switched off the
light again and waited, staring intently at the wall, then
I 62

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

switched it on again: the flash and rustle was the frantic effort
of hordes of cockroaches to escape into darkness. In disgust
and anger I began to turn out my bags and spilled hundreds of
cockroaches from my clothes. Every morning my wrists were
bleeding with the bites of bed bugs.
In this hote! we had been compelled to change our itinerary
because we were waiting for an interview with the Communist
chief of the town who was supposed to be arranging certain
visits for us. Every day I was told that he was 'inaccessible',
'away', 'delayed', or 'ill' according to whomever I asked. Next
door to my room was the hotel's best suite, facing on to the
street. I was kept awake many nights by the crash of glasses,
the guffaws of men, and the screams of girls. I remembered
the seedy little pimp in the Oktober Hotel and wondered. An
orgy of Maxim Gorki intensity was going on day and night.
More curious than complaining I spoke to the manager. He
looked startled. 'Sir, it is. nothing that you hear,' he said
earnestly. 'It is a conference.' 'Sounds a very Russian one to
me,' I said. 'It is best not to joke,' he muttered. Then in a
confidential undertone. 'It is the Communist leader himself.
That is why you cannot see him. He is too busy at his work. It
is best if your party does not stay.'
Since we had already waited three days for the man in the
next room to me, I took the hint and the party travelled on to
Kiev a night later.
In Rostov I had often seen two sleek priests, as alike as
twins, driving together in a droshky. They had long, well
brushed chestnut beards, and curly chestnut hair which came
down to their shoulders. No one molested them or remarked
them, and though on the whole the priests of Europe are not
among the cleanest members of the community, these two
impressed me by just this quality amid the general squalor of
the town. In Leningrad, however, a full-scale anti-God
campaign was in progress and no priests were to be seen
walking openly in the streets, let alone riding in droshkies. On
the contrary one met, everywhere, the anti-God demonstrators,
the processions of trade-unionists, communist youth and
young pioneers, holding up to the sky for God to see their
grotesque caricatures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, their evil
banners of fat, concupiscent priests pawing money bags with
hands like claws, or ripping the bodices off young girls. The
I 63

T H E LENINIST C I R C US

Cathedral of St. Isaac, magnificent outside, but tawdry

within, was given over to secular purposes and housed, in fact,
an anti-God exhibition which my conscientious atheism
compelled me to visit. It was no more than a static procession,
debased by the same coarse caricatures, and the same j okes
from the anti-clerical armoury of the whole world, aimed at the
disparity between priestly promise and performance. There
was the same lustful gloating, at the level of lavatory graffiti,
over the Holy Family and the mystery of virgin birth.
'Research' had made its contribution in the form of a number of
glass cases containing bones or holy relics ofwhich the allegedly
fraudulent character was gleefully revealed. Religion was
'exposed' as part of the 'pathology' of capitalism and Lenin's
and Marx's dicta on the subject were to be found everywhere.
How nauseating and obscene it was to me, above all in this
vast cathedral where despite the vulgarity, there was the
whisper of the mystery beyond man's power to penetrate.
An air of heavy-handed official instigation hung over the
campaign for 'The Abolition of Relics of Superstition,' from
beginning to end. One could almost sec it in terms of an
official calendar of celebrations on the desk of some overworked
bureaucrat, an affair to be sandwiched expeditiously between
the Komsomol Week and 'the Week for the Loan of the
Toiling Masses for the Socialist Construction of the Fourth
Year of the First Five Year Plan'. It contrasted so lamentably
with the noble policy enunciated by Lunarcharsky, who said
that the religious monuments and buildings of the whole of
Russia were part of the immemorial heritage of the proletariat,
and had to be preserved, or, where they had suffered from
priestly greed or ignorance, restored. That was an attitude
which necessitated a certain reverence for religion, even if one
labelled it human error. But the Communists were proud of
the number of churches which they could boast, in I 93 I , of
having turned over to 'useful' purposes like schools, clubs,
pigsties, granaries, stables and rifle ranges. They had posted
up a list of these 'conversions' in the Cathedral ofSt. Isaac.
I am sorry to say that our official report drew a discreet veil
over the whole thing.
The investigations of our party showed the utmast disparity
in wages. The information collected by one member showed
that the lowest wage of which he had record was 20 roubles a
I 64

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

month for young pcople employed by t h e Rostov Tobacco

Factory: industrial workers generally received from 8o to 1 00
roubles per month. Managerial incomes began where these
left off and rose to about 300 roubles a month, the wage of a
director of the l\!Ioscow Dynamo. 'The director's wage,' the
report said, 'is, of course, the Communist Party's maximum,
i.e., the maximum that a member of the party may accept.
Thus a member of the directing staff does not necessarily get
more than the workers under him; a revolutionary position
indeed !' In view of the high prices we did not see how a worker
could live on 8o roubles a month. But I had learnt the Marxist
lesson well, I now see. I wrote for the Report a casuistical
j ustification which riot only explained away the vast disparity
between wages and conditions in the land of equality, but got
rid of shortages too. Although I am now ashamed of this, I
will quote the most important section : it is essential to-day to
understand by what verbal tricks we deceived ourselves then.
I first explained that there were genuine shortages in the
U.S.S.R. especially of perishable foodstuffs and consumers'
goods, due to the overloading of the transport system, to its
seasonal congestions, and to inexperienced management, 'but
more than all these, at least as far as manufactured goods are
concerned (shortage) is due to capita! being directed into
heavy industry and machine industry, and not, at the moment,
into light industry: hence the country is industrializing itself
at the expense of its standard of living and an abundance of
cheap manufactured goods'.
All this was scrupulously honest, but then I began to peddle
a dubious line of Marxist apologetics. The shortage, I decided,
was to a large extent more apparent than real, for this reason :
'In England, or any other country for that matter, excepting
the U.S.S.R., supply and demand determine the price of an
article. Jf, say, we were short of boots the price of boots would
rise until the supply adjusted itself to the demand. In other
words, boots would be supplied not to those who bad need of
them, necessarily, but only to those who could make their
demand effective in terms of money. This is the normal
working of economic laws in capitalist countries, and the
subject of countless textbooks. However, prices in the U.S.S.R.
are rigidly controlled, they do not rise; if there is a shortage
production proceeds until supply meets demand, though
r 6s

T H E L E N I N IST C I R C U S

prices do drop rapidly if supply overwhelms demand. Thus the

regular wage earner has the best of both worlds.
'Nor is that all that goes to create an apparent shortage.
Wages in the U.S.S.R. are continually being scaled upwards, white
prices remainfixed or are scaled downwards .
So shortage is always
real in capitalist countries but never apparent because produc
tion is cut and prices are raised to level up with ( effective)
demand, whilst in Russia shortage is always apparent, but
never so real, because actual purchasing power is always
outstripping productive power, and not, as in the bourgeois
states, lim ping miles behind it.' I then went on to announce
that this situation caused the bourgeois critics much joy 'but
little consolation in the end, because falling prices and rising
wages, while they res ult in a temporary state of affairs in which
a man can only spend his wages by re-investing part of them
back into industry, mean that the standard of living is rapidly
on the upgrade.'
The italics were mine in the original text, which emphasizes
the importance I attached to my casuistical argument. But as
far as I can see I had no evidence at all either that wages were
being continually scaled upwards, or that prices were following
the reverse trend. lndeed, this was not happening. I was the
fatuously willing victim of propaganda, and the doctrine of
what ought to happen under socialism had become confused
in my mind with what was actually taking place in Russia.
About that my observations on the spot, carried on in co
operative stores of every grade, told me that goods were
expensive and scarce. Most of the available goods were rationed,
but upon a far from equal basis. The hetter paid workers
enjoyed correspondingly hetter restaurants and had superior
shopping facilities : it did not appear to me that the poorly
paid workers (who were the bulk) enjoyed compensatory
privileges, though in our shame about this inequality we
hastened to gloss over their destitution. The capacity
to live at all, even at subsistence leve! (for the rations to which
one was entitled did not always arrive) depended on one's
power to buy in what we should call to-day the black market,
but which Russia called the free market, which even the
government entered, as trader, in order to scoop off purchasing
power. In the free market prices might be anything from ten
to a hundred times the prices of rationed goods. The worker's
1 66
.

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

standard of living was governed by the cash he had left after

he had paid his rent, dues, levies and the cost of the rationed
goods he managed to daim. The eighty-rouble-a-month worker
had no more than ten or so roubles to spare, enough
for a little free market butter or skimmed milk, whereas the
well-paid worker perhaps scraped together a hundred. To buy
an overcoat, sheets, blankets or even a cooking pot might be as
much the cause of a major financial crisis in a Russian work
man's home as for an English unemployed family to embark
on the purchase of a piano. A budget which looked hopeful
on controlled prices became penurious once it had to face the
purchase of some necessity, unobtainable in the co-operatives,
at free market prices.
My first argument-that the Russian standard of living was
being constantly scaled down to provide capita! for heavy
industry-was the true one: it could not be maintained, in
logic or in truth, with the contrary one I also advanced. No
country in Russia's impoverished situation could have carried
out enormous capital investments in heavy industry in a
period of rising wages and falling prices of consumer goods.
The Russians were buying up the products of factories faster
than they could be turned out not because their standard of
living was high but because there was a famine of the simplest
necessities, deliberately brought about when N.E.P. was ended,
and planning introduced. It was difficult to reconcile this
wretched, miserly austerity with the victory of the working
dass : had this dass really possessed dictatorial power it would
immediately have set about reversing the order of Russian
economic priorities : consumer goods would have been produced
in greater abundance whatever the cost to Russian heavy
industry. Certainly in a time of food famine, the export of
food would have been stopped. But though in 1 93 1 hunger
was acute, I returned to London on a boat the holds of which
were loaded with barrels of fruit pulp and tubs of Siberian
butter.
Why then, in the Report, did I and other contributors put
such a good face on our experiences? Because there was
another side to the whole picture and it was this which
iinpressed us most. We contrasted the new Russia with the
effete, enfeebled Tzarist regimes. The U .S.S.R. was in the
midst of a gigantic reconstruction and most Russians we met
1 67

T H E L E N I N IST C I R C U S

were glowing with pride about it. Whatever their private

difficulties and disappointments, there before them concretely
in new tenement, canal, factory, model city and railroad, the
new socialist world was rising about them. We saw this plan
being worked out. A builder in the party recorded that he
'did not remember a single factory which was not in process of
enlargement, sometimes to double its size'. Factory complexes
like Selmashtroy, near Rostov, where a plant had been erected
on sand y waste for the manufacture of equipment on Ford lines,
deeply impressed me. The bays were as broad and airy as
aeroplane hangars, and production had started even in some
that were only half-finished. Scores of times we stopped at
places where new cities or works were rising with the speed of
shanty towns. One felt around one the exhilarating sense of a
nation which had taken off its coat and was seriously
attacking its backwardness. If there was at times a note of
hysteria in the official propaganda about it, and if, too,
the sober British workmen of our party could see plenty of
evidence of waste and mass spoilage, yet all seemed excused by
the supreme effort Russia was making. Since it bore such
a startling contrast to the growing misery and inertia at
home, we were one and all anxious not to be carping or
obscurantist in the face of the making of history. A proverb
more fruitful of evil than any other I know was often repeated
among us-'You cannot make an omelette without breaking
eggs.'
As guests of honour we sat in the Tzar's box in the old
Maryinsky theatre looking down on so many rows of soberly
clad trade-unionists that the evening gathering resembled
more a session of the Leningrad Soviet than a night of gaiety,
and watched the old Imperial corps-de-ballet dance its
way austerely through the three acts of Delibes' Sylvia with
out one concession to the rough new world. Our hosts of
the Leningrad Co-operative Society and Vera, our inter
preter, told us with pride that everything was unchanged,
not a traditional step had been disturbed by the Revolu
tion : yet what I thought of most of the time was that it was
upon these boards that Pavlova had learned to dance so
incomparably.
It was not until I watched Mayakovsky's production of
Roar China, Tretiakoff's bitter tract against British Imperialism,
r 68

T H E L E NI N IST C I R C U S

i n the Opera House a t Kiev that I discovered the revolutionary

theatre in all its vigour. In this play, the theatre had become
purely the vehicle of Bolshevik propaganda. The production
was severely stylized : a Cubist battleship dominated the
stage, and choruses of coolies advanced upon it, and retreated
from it, with a uniformity which would have done credit to the
Brigade of Guards. There were no individuals in the play, only
symbols of forces, as befitted a theatre which poured scorn on
drama about persons. Tretiakoff's play resolved itself into a
Greek drama, with protagonists and chorus, and the root of the
dramatization became more obvious still when British officers
appeared on the scene wearing the grotesque masks of Pravda
caricatures-long faces, fang-like teeth, turned up noses and
monocles. There was generic similarity between these monstrous
figures and the cartoons of wicked priests and capitalists in
St. Isaac's: the Soviet Union was busy creating its mythology
of the capitalist underworld. Despite the gargantuan
stylizations, the play was a stirring and brilliant spectacle : I did
not understand more than one word in two hundred, and Vera
grew tetchily impatient when I asked her to translate, but I no
more needed to understand the speech than the peasants who
might have been in the audience. For the grotesque mime told
the story just as well as the words. Roar China turned out to be
rather a dull play when I came to read its English translation,
which I bought at the Bomb Shop in Charing Cross Road. The
bitterness of the author against mythological capitalists
smelled too rankly in it. It was played by some London left
wing theatre groups and hailed as the 'last word in the exposure
of British Imperialism in China'. But the last word, as a matter
of fact, rested with the Kremlin, which executed Tretiakoff in
I 9 3 7 on the grounds that he had been a Japanese spy for
twenty years.
,
No genuine proletarian would have gone to Roar China out of
choice. Where then were the entertainments of the masses?
I discovered them only when I visited what was called a
circus, but was in fact a vaudeville show. The circus was
housed in a shabby, ftapping marquee on some waste ground on
the outskirts of Kiev. The trodden earth around it exuded
an odour of baked and trampled grass. Barefoot children, their
naked torsoes burnt black by the hot steppe sun crowded
round the entrance or, m defiance of the new proletarian
t 6g

THE L ENINIST CIRCUS

morality, sought to sneak inside by crawling under the tent

brailing. Chewed rinds of melon and sunflower husk were scat
tered among the usual litter of the twisted cardboard holders of
the state monopoly cigarettes (3,000 tons of woodpulp had been
saved in one year, my notebook said, by cutting the length of
the holder 1 centimetre) . The propaganda of the circus was
purely formal, and consisted of some slogans about the five
year plan printed in white on red streamers, and a worn
portrait of Stalin underneath a description of itself as 'The
Leninist Circus'.
The atmosphere was pungent with Balkan tobacco, and
the inescapable Russian odour of yesterday's cabbage soup.
The show was so bad, for the most part, that it reminded me
of the Penny Theatre I had once visited in a field near the
centre of Princes Risborough, where the policeman, ostler,
judge and jailer was also the heroine, and spoke in a surprising
falsetto which he occasionally, out of an excess of zeal, applied
to the wrong part. There was a one-act domestic drama with a
Marxist moral of which I understood not a word except the
moral, which was that the good Marxist workman gets the
pretty girl as well as the shock-brigadier award, and then a
dancing bear of the kind one saw in the streets of London in
1 g 1 3 jigging to the fiddle of a German musician. The poor thin
tumblers and contortionists who displayed on trapezes looked
like the starveling mountebanks of Picasso's blue period. A
comedian with a red nose sang a nasal song and the wretched
show went drivelling on, before the delighted audience, until
three men came on pushing what purported to be a grand
piano. At once the atmosphere became pure Grock. The first
man was little and fat and dressed in clothes so much too big
for him that he kept losing his hands and feet. Every time he
wanted to do something with a hand he had to push it through
yards of sleeving. When he wanted to run he had to hold his
trousers up, and if he wanted to run with something in his
hands, first he had to put the thing down and pull his trousers
up, and then he had to let his trousers go in order to pick the
thing up. In that way he made the kind of progress which
somehow resembled Russia's economy under the Five Year
Plan, if the truth be known. But he was not guying anything
except himself, and in the grand clowning tradition to which
the reeking tent immediately warmed.
1 70

T H E LENINIST CIRCUS

The second chap was of middling size but dressed in clothes

so much too short for him that yards of bilious sock showed
below his turn-ups, and his shirt leaked out around his waist.
The third on the other hand was tall and solemn with a sad
face, he wore black tights and a black bowler and looked like an
undertaker's mute. They were the piano-tuner's shock brigade.
It took them a week to get the piano in position, despite the
advice the audience shouted. They pushed it first this way, and
then that, and then they came to one side and regarded it
cheek on hand-all except the fat little man, and he could
never make his cheek rest on his hand without it pushing him
over.
At last it was ready and they all shook hands, and the mute
sat down on the stool to play. The first note came out so flat
that the audience shrieked. The mute raised one frozen
eyebrow at us and we let out another howl. And so he started to
look inside the piano, and immediately he got up from his seat
a tune began to play somewhere on its own accord. All three of
them walked thoughtfully round looking for the tune. The
mute grew so worried that he rummaged in the piano and
hauled out the things he found in its innards-a string of
calico sausages, a frying pan and a chamber pot which he
threw at the other two. To clear up the mess the middle-sized
one gathered them all up and stuffed them down the fat man's
trousers. They fell out of the bottom, of course, and the fat man
let go of his trousers and picked them up, and then he put them
down and picked up his trousers, and all the time the tune was
still playing. The mute sat down again. The tune stopped. He
stood up and it started again. The proletarians shouted at him.
Surprised by what they said he looked at the seat. He turned it
over. There was nothing. He lifted up the top of the seat and a
pigeon ftew out and ftapped to the back of the stage where a
hand shot out of Stalin's mouth and caught it surrealistically.
The other two were hunting in each other's clothes where
they found every suggestive kind of object except a tune. The
maddening music-box went on playing: technically it was
quite interesting to speculate where it might be. The audience
shouted with delight and so the mute smashed the seat to
pieces (but in the kind of way which meant they could put it
together again for the next show) and still no tune, and the
seat wasn't any good to sit on any more. So the mute sat on the
I7I

T H E LENIN IST C I R C U S

middle man's knees, and the middle m a n sat on the little man's
knees and he gradually subsided until he lay on the floor
holding his friends up by one finger supporting the middle
sized man's behind. He would forget what he was doing and
whisk his finger away to scratch his nose, but just before the
two quite collapsed his one stubby finger would lift them up
again. Of course the tune stopped while the mute was playing
on the cracked piano, but it started as soon as they broke up
the balancing act.
The audience worked itself into a frenzy and shouted
instructions which made the proletarian girls blush. Horrified
at them the sad-faced mute raised himself up, pulled his
clothes meaningly together and began to mince offwith his nose
in the air. The fat man pulled out a stethoscope and tried to
find the tune by listening to the bums of the other two, and in
other surprising places. Then they all began to crawl about
under the piano. They exchanged hats, they got entangled in
the fat man's trousers, they found a dead eat and threw it at
the audience and had a wonderful time. But no tune. And so
they got really angry. They pulled the piano to bits and threw
the bits into the wings where invisible hands caught them.
Nothing came out except the same pigeon. But to our relief the
tune had gone with the piano. They smiled beatific smiles at
each other, shook hands, raised hats and sat down on invisible
chairs, crossing their legs, picking their noses and looking
quite happy. When they stood up and turned around to go
the tune started. The audience gave a roar. Each one had a
musical box tied to his seat. How had they got there? We had
certainly not seen them before. The three clowns pretended
that they did not know what our noise was about. They looked
uncomfortable, as though they'd holes in their trousers, or had
left buttons undone. They pulled themselves about to see what
was wrong, grew embarrassed, tried to bow, but fell on their
noses. But they would not understand that we had rumbled
where the tune was, and so bowing and scraping and falling
over to our roaring, they went off. Of course, we did not
actually know that any music came out of those little music
boxes and nobody bothered to tell us, which made us mad .
' I think,' said Vera seriously, 'that they had a gramophone
record and played it at the back. It was a cheat that they did
not let us know where it came from.' And later: 'Perhaps it was
1 72

T H E L EN I N I S T C I R C U S

not good propaganda that Russian workmen should look so

inefficient.'
No matter how the audience roared they did not come back
and when the next turn started, and it was a row of poker
faced Uzbekistanis shuffling through a national dance in what
seemed to me a Red Indian kind of costume, we left. Even the
audience which had paid for its seats grew restless, and looked
about for cigarettes to buy, and began to chew sunflower seeds
again and spit the husks on the duckboards and beaten mud
floor, and chattered to neighbours.
Our interpreter was Vera : I have forgotten her un
pronounceable second name. She lived in Leningrad and by
the look in her face at times I could see that she regarded
Rostov and Kiev as foreign cities in the same way that we did.
She had a merry, weathered and impish face, always brown and
often dirty, and impossible to beautify : indeed, when she did
try, the result was disastrous, for cosmetics sat in an alien way
upon her face, making her look like a street-walker. She wore
a gay and shapeless felt hat which hacl once been fashionable
the gift of an English traveller in an earlier year, and a much
wrinkled tartan blouse and tweed skirt from a similar source.
She was in her early thirties but the struggles one divined in her
past made her look older: about these I knew nothing, but
somewhere she had managed to learn English well, and it was
certain she came of a good family. She was married, and had
one little boy, and had divorced her husband and was in a
perpetua! emotional tangle about marrying again. Every now
and then, though far from home, she sighed deeply about her
domestic situation. She welcomed us with squeals of delight, for
she had come to love her English friends, whose arrival meant
cosmetics, stockings, chocolate and photographs from past
admirers in England. All this was most pleasant for her in this
austere land, and, even hetter under a regime where the bare
means of life were lacking to many, was the privilege of
travelling 'soft' through the length and breadth of Russia and
feeding on the best in the land. We, of course, never lacked
for food. Once or twice in every town there was a banquet for
us. The first, at a restaurant on the Finnish border, went on
for fou r hours : it was two o'clock in the morning when, ripe
with wine and food and intoxicated by fraternal speeches, we
tumbled into our hote! bedrooms. There was, at that banquet,
I 73

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

six courses of hors d'oeuvres only three of which I could name.

We thought this, in our inexperience, the banquet itself, and
ate heartily. But we were wrong: only after that did the
enormous main dishes come. It was the only occasion in my
life when I have seen Englishmen going out to the urinal to be
sick, and coming back to the banquet, like Romans, to begin
again. If they had brought out a roast swan, as was once the
custom of the Tzars, it would not have surprised me. Banquets
were regarded as official and even necessary acts of gorging and
it was certain that the Russians enjoyed the licence to eat and
drink as much as they could, as their impromptu dances
between courses demonstrated. One glance at the people in the
Leningrad streets had shown me that there was poverty still in
the U.S.S.R. and I was now and then ashamed of our com
munal gluttony: and certainly ashamed when coming out of the
restaurant, a workman watching us rushed up to me and
caught hold of the lapels of my coat and began what I first
thought was a speech of welcome and then soon learnt was an
angry denunciation of our bourgeois wantonness. The guards
threw him angrily away into a ditch. 'But what did he say,
Vera?' I asked earnestly. She turned crossly about, hitching
one shoulder at me. 'Oh, he is mad, quite mad. He did not
know you were foreign guests. We will not discuss it, please.'
What a bourgeois world it was into which Vera had free
entry! She could take home the most wonderful presents for
her little boy and the two lovers between whom she hesitated.
'
But how precarious it was too. All relationships between
Soviet citizens and foreigners were discouraged, and Vera's
life was nothing else, and there would come a time, though
this was official duty, when the Communist Party would
decide that she was 'contaminated' and get rid of her. I
thought about this even then, and wondered what would
become of her. From Moscow onwards a pale, dark slothful
young man was attached to our party and travelled everywhere
we went. Russian trains do not have separate sleepers for men
and women and so, automatically, he took over a bunk in
Vera's otherwise empty compartment, and perhaps enjoyed
other privileges there. At first she whispered to me 'He is from
Intourist. He just goes with us as far as Rostov.' But then later,
when she knew me hetter, and felt she could trust me, 'He is
from the Party. vVe must watch our behaviour,' and she made a
I 74

THE LENINIST CIRCUS

monkey grimace with her prematurely wrinkled face. And there

he was always, saying little, speaking almost no English,
extremely contemptuous of us all, and trying (but not succeed
ing very well) to impress Vera. We detested him.
Vera was as inconsequential and as incalculable as all
Russians. She informed us, when we left Rostov, that we should
have to go by a special route to Kiev, which would take us two
days longer than we had planned, and that there would be no
restaurant car on the train. This was, of course, at the eleventh
hour, and we scrambled round trying to buy provisions for the
journey and all we succeeded in getting were biscuits, caviare,
tea and fruit. Never in my life again do I want to feed for
two whole days upon caviare thickly spread on soft sweet
biscuits. What we lacked in food we made up for in tea. At
every important station in Russia there is a kipyatok, a hot
water tap from which the traveller fills up his old tin can in
which he brews his tea, or keeps his hot water for washing and
shaving. As the train drew into a station the travellers poised
themselves hopefully on the running boards, with clanging
cans in hand, to leap off as soon as we slowed down and dash to
the kipyatok. I was young and lithe and could often beat them
to it. But even if one arrived first, one's troubles were not over.
The kipyatok might give an unexpected gurgle and die, and as
one expostulated to the queue that it was not your fault, it
would explode boiling water everywhere. In the midst of the
clamour round the tap the bell on the engine would clang to
indicate our impending departure, and those remote from the
water would begin despairingly to scream and gesticulate :
sometimes there would be no clang from the bell, but out of
the corner of our eyes we would catch sight of the train silently
sneaking out of the station and the queue would explode with
a shriek and we would race, spilling water everywhere, to
climb aboard. Vera had to make plausible speeches, at long
stops, in order to get food out of co-operatives or from the
peasants. And so I managed to buy at one station a small
roasted chicken and a loaf of gritty black bread : I paid a
fabulous sum for it and, in the absence of plate, knife and fork
had to use my fingers only. But it was long since I had enjoyed
a meal so much. I discovered later from Vera that we
need not have travelled at all by this route, we could have
gone the soft direct route on a train with a restaurant
1 75

T H E LENINIST CIRCUS

car : but the way wc went gave her a chancc, once every year
or so, to say a few words to her mother at a Ukraine station,
and to exchange tearful hugs and kisses. It was nice to think
that in a super-planned state we could be at the mercy of such
an affectionate whim. But I should never have learnt anything
about it ifwe had not become such good friends.
During the tour, despite the spy, Vera became more con
sciously one of us. Her clothes improved as dresses changed
hands. She was given eau-de-cologne and lipstick and blossomed
befare our eyes. It was only as we approached Leningrad
again that I saw trepidation clouding her bright eyes. What
would her husbands-for it really seemed the case that she
had two-think of this transformation in her? Would they like
her for her beauty and chic, or would they despise her for
behaviour not proletarian in character? This agitation began
to ruin the effect she had planned. The sequel came after our
return to the Oktober Hotel. Vera came running into my room
the same evening. ' My husband is here,' she shrieked, in a
flutter of hands and eyes. 'What shall I do? Quick, tell me, help
me. He must not see me in these clothes, and with lipsticks.'
I stopped her firmly.
'Vera-look-you said you were divorced. If you are, it's
nothing more to do with him what you do.'
Two little tears appeared in her eyes. 'He is in the Party.
He is powerful and can tell me what to do.'
'He can't eat you. Look, take my arm and let's walk down
stairs to dinner.'
She trembled with terror, and bit her lips, as she took my
arm and walked down the grand staircase to the dining room.
She gave a little moan when she saw her ex-husband glaring
angrily from the foot of the stairs. He was a young man with a
great mass of tumbled black hair and the pale face of a Does
toevsky hero. I was afraid that Vera would c ry and her tears
run down the make-up on her face, so that by the time she
got to the bottom she would look like a wax doll whose face
has been held to the fire. But she bowed her head and gripped
my arm tightly and walked bravely with me. The ex-husband
was not content to wait. He rushed upstairs, his face working,
his black locks shaking like a warlock's, and seized hold of me.
I had to listen to a fierce denunciation of myself in Russian and
could only thrust him off and wait until Vera could translate.
1 76

T H E L ENINIST CIRCUS

Efficient even in an emotional crisis, Vera translated between

sobs, 'He blames you. No Bolshevist girl uses make-up. It is
your fault. He says you have made me-he says you have made
me-no, I cannot say what he says !' and with a howl of misery
Vera rushed away to her room. When I set out to rush after
her, my Bolshevik friend held me fast, and pushed me firmly
back and went after her himself.
I went unheroically down, with a sad shrug for it all, to the
bar. There I was drinking when Vera came to me nearly half an
hour later. Her make-up had gone : she had returned to her old
clothes and, had it been the Bolshevik custom, would have stood
before me in sackcloth and ashes. She stood there, in the misery
of her little penance, finding it difficult to lift her eyes to me.
'He tells me to say he is sorry,' she said wretchedly. 'He sees
now you are a spiritual man and would like to be friends.' And
she began to cry and between sobs jerked her head towards the
foot of the stairs where the ex-husband was standing, eyes to the
floor, like some sulky, scolded white-faced child. Her misery was
contagious and I squeezed her hands gently and kissed them,
and went and fetched the pale young man to the bar.
Vera's situation was the more awkward because her ex
husband, who had just displayed so much jealousy, still shared
her flat. Indeed, but for the formality of a divorce, her
ex-husband was still her husband : it was the fiance who was
out in the cold. I became good friends even with Vera's
ex-husband and went to dine with them in their tiny flat. We
dined well on bortsch and roast sturgeon and bottles of good
red wine. The little boy in a sailor suit was a merry miniature
of Vera herself, and was proud to shake hands with an English
friend. I made him a little cup of silver foil from a box of sweets
I had brought, and he carried it repeatedly to the table to have
it filled with wine: his chuckles grew more and more delighted
with each repetition until more by force of suggestion than by
quantity of wine drunk he had managed to make himself
intoxicated and his mother carried him anxiously away and
put him to bed : left so, Vera, her husband and I smoked,
played chess, and swapped tales of the past until the early
hours. The next morning, with Vera and her little boy in tears
at the quayside, and not far from tears myself, I set sail for
England once again. It was us el ess to imagine that I should
ever see this gay and lovable woman again.
M

I77

CHAPTER TEN

'Nothing is lnnocent'

n the voyage out to Russia my party carried a tiny super

O numary and through him I was vouchsafed a glimpse of a

second Russian home. He came aboard at Hay's Wharf, face

puffed and eyes sore with crying, and stood at the rail waving
mournfully down at a weeping girl and a fat little Jew whose
face was so creased with unhappiness that he looked as though
he might at any moment join the children in their tears. I will
call the child Alexei Balanov, for his history was a strange one,
not to be guessed from the neat grey flannel suit which made
him look like an English grammar school boy. As thin as a
post, a trifle round-shouldered, and fair, perhaps his fierce blue
eyes were the only Russian thing about him. He was going to
join his mother in Russia : she was no longer Balanova, but
Kirinova, and thereby hung a tale which began way back in
the days of the Revolution. That tale I pieced together only
slowly and over a long period of time, but here it is.
Alexei's father was the manager and owner of a leather
factory in Petrograd when the revolution broke out. Though
he was not interested in politics he was, as a capitalist, suspect
from the beginning. However, for a year or two he was left
alone because the Bolsheviks brought back as managers the
men whose businesses they had taken over. And so life con
tinued to be tolerable for a while. But the mounting frenzy of
the Civil War promoted a terror against all bourgeois, and
Balanov, finding his position growing more precarious, and the
future dangerous, made preparations to leave secretly. He
b ribed the captain of a Finnish vessel to provide passages for
himself, his wife, who was then carrying Alexei in her womb,
1 78

' N O T H I N G IS INNO CENT '

and his sister. He came aboard the boat with his wife, but his
sister had failed to make the rendezvous. Against the entreaties
of his wife he decided to go back and look for her, and, full of
forebodings, left his wife in charge of the skipper. The skipper
waited, fortunately unchallenged, for several hours, and then
decided, despite the lamentations of Balanova, that he must
move before dawn. Balanova never heard of her husband or
sister-in-law again. Alone, pregnant, she made her way to
England, where Alexei was horn. One can imagine the life of
the penniless exile-the round of charitable organizations, the
lodgings in Charlotte Street and the Cromwell Road, the
efforts to earn something by teaching and translating, the daily
hope of news from Russia, the guarded letters which were never
answered.
Then came hetter days. The honeymoon of the first Labour
Government with the Soviets produced a Soviet Trade Delega
tion which gave birth to the powerful Arcos organization in
the City of London. Typists who knew Russian were in demand.
Balanova, against whom the Bolsheviks had nothing politically,
made her peace with the Russian authorities in London, and
joined the staff of the Trade Delegation. So, peacefully, while
the child Alexei was growing, she earned a reasonable living.
Of course, she fell in love, and with an earnest young Com
munist, fresh from Russia, on the staff of Arcos. Love and
dialectics both persuaded her that in Russia things had become
hetter, that the excesses of the revolution and civil war were
over, and that the Soviet Government was offering the equiva
lent of an amnesty to all who came over to its side. Eventually,
presuming her husband dead, she married the Arcos employee
and they lived together in the Cromwell Road. Then eventually
Kirin, the new husband, was recalled. He travelled hastily
back, leaving his wife and stepson behind. Presently letters
arrived entreating her to come to Moscow, but to leave Alexei
behind for the present until arrangements could be made for
him. This was not what they had planned, and Kirinova grew
worried. When she re-read her husband's letters she began to
feel with horror that there was a note in them which was not
the appeal of a lover. Perhaps there was the unacknowledged
pressure of the authorities : her return might be the test of his
loyalty. And so, in heart-searching and fear, she decided to
go back to the land which had certainly murdered her first
1 79

' N OT H I N G IS I N N O C E N T '

husband, and to leave behind the little boy for whom she had
gone through so much. Alexei was left with London friends who
were both co-operators and socialists. For some time his
mother was able to write regularly and to send funds to pay
for his board and lodgings. If there was a cloud over the
young couple in Moscow, no one heard of it. Then came the
slump. Russia suffered like the rest of the world and placed a
ban on the export of funds. If Alexei could not be supported by
friends in England, then there was only the choice between
putting him in an institution, or returning him to his mother.
The communists in charge of him could not understand why
there should be any delay. They were only surprised that his
mother had left him so long in England. The Soviet was the
worker's fatherland, where there was no exploitation, no
poverty and no unemployment-what hetter future could the
boy want? So they took out a Russian passport for him and
shipped him to Russia in the care of my party. The moment
Alexei stepped on board he lost his right to return to England
and became a Russian subject.
Alexei spent the first few days of the voyage gloomily
sticking up his stamp collection or curled up on a settee in the
saloon reading the Champion and the Wizard. Gradually his
surliness thawed and he put words to his resentments. 'I don't
see why I have to go to Moscow : she could have come to
England.' 'I don't see why I have to call him father. My real
father's dead.' These came out, quite unexpectedly, in the
midst of conversations about other things, and he screwed his
little face up and almost spat them at me. 'I don't tell anybody
but you, but I know, and my mamma knows they killed him.'
But when I asked him who was it that 'they' had killed, he
looked frightened and refused to talk. But when I was sitting
in a deck chair later in the day, he crept behind me, and
whispered breathlessly, 'If you promise not to tell, I'll tell you,
it was my real dad.' His brooding spirit lightened a little as we
glided quietly across the still, hot Baltic, but unhappiness began
to descend on him as we neared Leningrad. 'What shall I do
if she isn't there?' he asked, panic in his eyes. 'I know she won't
be there, I know. I know.' And indeed, she was not. Instead, a
gloomy incommunicative young man had been sent to fetch
him. He showed me a letter, written in Russian and intended
really for the Russian authorities, of which I could not read a
r 8o

' N OT H I N G I S I N N O C E N T '

word. I had to c all in a Jew in o ur party who knew some

Russian and had some knowledge of Alexei's circumstances,
but he grew so nervous and frightened at the thought of ad
mitting that he knew the language that I suspected that he was
a Russian emigre himself, or had dose connection with them.
He obliged, sweating, ungracious and gabbling.
It was a moment of the utmost confusion. The customs
officers were opening all our bags. A messenger from Intourist
was asking for me, but as he had turned my name round, as
most continentals do, and had made a mess of the word
'Leslie', no one knew what he was bleating so loudly abo ut.
All Alexei's trunks, packed with food and clothes sent by kind
friends, had been locked and tightly bound by rope, and now
that it came to a search, the keys could not be found. A hunt
in the boy's attache case and pockets yielded nothing. Alexei's
face was the picture of anger. 'No one told me. No one
told me a thing about anything. Why do they need to open
them? They said they could go all the way without being
opened.'
Without ceremony the customs officers slashed the rope and
smashed the locks while Alexei stared bleakly at them. The
tins of corned beef and milk and packets of cornflakes were
turn ed upside down. Rivulets of sugar trickled down among the
neatly packed clothes. It was during this shouting and con
fusion that Alexei, whose eyes had never ceased from a darting,
almost furtive search for a sight of his mother on the quay,
discovered that he was to be handed over to a complete
stranger. Now at last he broke down and flung his arms around
my neck and locked them. It was deeply painful to pull the
heartbroken child off by main force and to hand him over to
the sullen, unknown youth. I sought to reassure him by pro
mising that I would call on him in Moscow when I arrived, to
see that he was safe and well. Clutching at this hope Alex went
off, hardly more cheerful than when he boarded the boat, a
grief-stricken little figure weighed down by his case as he
struggled across the cobbles. The taciturn young man pre
ceded him with disdain. Behind, on a handcart, shaking out a
trail of sugar, came the ravaged trunks.
'You know,' said the Jew, officious and disapproving, 'they
don't like tourists paying private calls. It isn't very good for the
people either.'
I8I

' N OT H I N G IS I N N O C E N T '

I felt deeply uneasy, yet did not think I should draw back
from my promise because of what this frightened little man
thought. I had to go: everything about the boy filled me with
unhappiness. How had he managed to live day after day with
the Communist who had looked after him, concealing his hatred
and terror of the land to which he was now consigned? That
spoke for a depth of experience and maturity quite strange in
a boy of eleven years.
It was fortunate that I had to travel to Moscow in advance
of the party. I had to go in order to fix up the itinerary of the
party and to have a word, if possible, with Comrade Zelensky
and other co-operative chiefs. I had no intention to write a
travel book about Russia, but I thought I might attempt to
write a short account of the consumers' co-operative movement.
The interviews were to be the beginning of this effort: from
them I wanted to glean an idea of the ground I had to cover.
Ultimately I succeeded in this, though it took me four years of
research, which bore fruit in a modest little book which was
nevertheless the first of its kind. *
I sent a card to Alexei's mother, Kirinova, announcing my
intention to call and the opportunity came after a morning
spent at Centrosojus. At the hotel I was left quite unattended
with the whole afternoon before me. After the dark warnings
of the party, I decided to visit them as discreetly as possible. I
scoured the map of Moscow until I found the street : it seemed
feasible to walk there if I could memorize the route. I drew a
little sketch map on an old envelope, stuffed it in my pocket,
and set out. I found the street much more easily than I expected.
The flat was up two storeys in a dingy old tenement which
had seen hetter days. I knocked and Alexei opened the door
and made saucer eyes at me. 'How did you get here so
soon?' he asked. 'Didn't your mother get my card?' I asked in
reply. He shook his head. 'I'll tell granny.' He disappeared and
behind the half-closed door I heard furious colloquies. The
door opened and a frightened and cross old woman stood there
regarding me with a puzzled expression. When Alexei took
hold of my hand, she said with a sorrowful dignity, 'Will you
be so pleased as to come in?' in an English rusty from long dis
use. Grunting, shuffiing she led the way. She was fierce-eyed,
bent, and od dly formidable. She just did not conform. She was
*Co-operation in tlu U.S.S.R.; A study of the Consumers' Movement, I934

' N O T H I N G IS INNOCENT '

not of the regime, but the survivor of another world, like her
furniture. The small tenement room was crowded with massive
mahogany pieces from a bourgeois past. I bumped myself on
their sharp corners as I squeezed past beds and wardrobes to an
armchair.
'It is kind of you to call,' she said with a politeness the
coldness and fear in her eyes belied. 'Have you been to Russia
before?'
'No. My first visit. I find it interesting.'
I made a mistake then for my eyes had strayed to her book
case, and there set out in large blue, linen-bound volumes
lettered in gold, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were the
works of Lenin. I had learnt enough Russian on the boat to
have no hesitation in recognizing the name printed on the
spines of the volumes.
'I see you've Lenin's works,' I said, trying to break the ice.
Granny looked steadily at me with her burning speedwell blue
eyes. I could see where Alexei's sharp eyes came from.
'But you know our Russian language?'
'Oh just a few common words. We had lessons on the boat.'
'How did you come to our flat?'
'I just got a map and looked for the street, and walked here.'
I ftushed under her polite incredulity.
'It is not easy for a [oreigner who does not know Russian,
and has never been to Moscow before, to read our maps, and
find his way about this city. I do not find it very wise.'
I grew hotter and hotter with discomfort. 'I was worried
about the boy. I thought I would see if he had arrived safely. '
Alexei fidgeted unhappily, watching u s with wretched eyes
during these hostilities.
' Momma will be home soon and you can see her,' he said
in a whining way.
'Excuse, please,' said the grandmother. 'I will make you
some tea. Come with me, Alexei.' Alexei made a moue at me as
he was vigorously dragged away. They disappeared into a
small room like a scullery beyond, and once again the rapid
colloquy broke out. I was so moist with embarrassment by this
time that I could only consider how quickly I might get away.
Presently Alexei emerged sulkily and drifted around the room
with his head down, as though unwilling to talk to me.
'How d'you like Moscow?' I asked.
1 83

'

N O T H I N G IS I N N O C E N T

'

'She's afraid of you,' he whispered, giving me a mysterious

and meaningful look.
'For heaven's sake why?'
'She doesn't know who you are yet. She doesn't believe you.
I mustn't talk to you.'
I made a nonplussed gesture.
'I hate her,' he said with his fierce look. 'She ahvays jabbers
in Russian and I can't understand.'
I tried to take his mind off it and to get him to talk about
Moscow. But it was no good.
'She's always whispering. I don't want to stay here. I want
to go back to England.'
I asked about his father and mother.
'He isn't my father. My real father's dead. I told you how.
And I haven't seen my new father, but I'll show you a photo of
him if you like.'
He went across to the bookshelf and then turned and whis
pered, 'That's funny. It isn't here. She shoved it down the
back where I can't get it. I thought I saw her shove it down.'
He came and whispered confidentially.
'My new father's on a journey. I'm not to talk about it as
he's in great danger.'
His grandmother, wild with anxiety and anger at Alexei's
stage whispers, put her head through the door. She had, at
that moment, the boy's contorted look exactly.
'Alexei,' she shouted. 'What are you whispering about.
Don't you know that it's rude to whisper?'
'I was saying you always speak Russian to me and I don't
understand it,' he lied. 'And everyone else whispers, so why
shouldn't I?'
His grandmother flushed under his rudeness.
'I'm afraid he is a very naughty boy,' she said with a fright
ened and dubious glance at him, and she was so fussed and
nervous she could hardly pour the tea. She did not leave the
room now and so any more confidences from Alexei were im
possible. I made small talk about Moscow and tried to drink
my tea quickly so that I might escape, but Alexei's mother came
in before I had finished.
Kirinova was tall. She wore a white shawl over her head,
peasant fashion, but this was an affectation of beauty, for she
was not a peasant. Like Alexei she stooped a little, and was
1 84

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

round-shouldered, and exhausted with fatigue. Her face was

pale and her weary brown eyes above prominent cheek-bones,
were large and luminous. Her sad delicate beauty made my
heart beat pitifully fast, and sweat started on the palms of my
hands. When she gazed at me with her tragic and brimming
eyes I did not know where to look or what to do. Her scorching
beauty consumed me, wits and all, and I felt as abashed and
tongue-tied as a schoolboy before the first lovely woman he has
met. Even Alexei changed and stood silent and adoring before
his wonderful momma and came gently over to her, pressing
himself against her, and stroked her hands and felt her cheek
with curious fingertips to make sure that she was real. His
love for her was a good thing to see.
Her presence was so cairn and kindly that the tension
immediately began to ease. All at once it seemed to be accepted
that I was indeed the person who had brought Alexei over from
England, and not some mysterious intruder, and whcn I left
that night the rising friendliness of the little family made it
possible to agree that on a half-holiday clearly marked on the
itinerary, we should all go to the Park of Rest and Culture. On
the way home I thought of the resemblance between Alexei and
the grandmother. It was certain then that she was the mother of
Kirinova's first husband, Alexei's father, and I pondered
over her strange behaviour.
A day or two later, in the offices of Centrosojus, looking for
information in its Research Dcpartment, a clerk spoke to me,
in the most meticulous English. He was obviously a remarkable
person for the Russia of those days, for he wore a well-tailored
black jacket and pinstripe trousers, and a white collar and tie.
all carefully preserved, I bad no doubt, from the old regime.
He had the old world manners of a country doctor. 'Are you
the English gentleman who camc over on the Krassin?' I said I
was one of them, and my name was Paul. He bowed politely
and held out his hand : 'Then we have friends in common. I am
fricndly with the Kirinov family, and I am to take you to them
for the outing we have arranged.'
How little there is to tell after that encounter, yet how sad.
My new friend called for me on the day appointed and we
walked through the streets to the flat of Lydia Kirinova and
the child Alexei. On the way we hardly spoke about them, but
discussed the growth of the co-operative movement under the
! 85

' N O T H I N G IS INNO CENT '

Tzars, about which my friend was well informed. We made our

excursion by crowded trams to the Moscow Park of Rest and
Culture: myself, my cultured guide, the frightened grand
mother, and the boy. Alexei sat on my knee in the crowded tram,
jigging with excitement. The clouds around him seemed to
have lifted on this sunny little excursion. He was so gay and vital
that all the fears which had been growing in me concerning his
new life now appeared bourgeois hallucinations. I gave him a
tender squeeze. What harm could possibly come to him?
'You're a plucky boy, I think,' I whispered to him. 'Keep
your courage up and everything will be fine for you, l'm sure.'
A spasm of terror passed over his face, as ifuntimely reminded
of things he had been happy to forget. He gripped my jacket
lapels with his small brown fists and worried them, angry
and frightened.
'Don't say that about me. Don't. Don't ever! ' he whispered
fiercely and urgently. 'You don't know all. And I can't tell
you when she's watching.'
'She' was his grandmother, who stared avidly and broodingly
at him. I was silenced, and patted him to cairn him. I stared
out of the tram windows at Moscow's endless architectural
improvizations, and at the drab milling crowd in the
street, full offorebodings. These were the last words Alexei and I
were able to exchange about his troubles.
Lydia, the boy's mother, met us at the gates with free tickets
she had secured from the shock brigade of which she was, she
told me, a chief. We saw a display by young pioneers which
reminded me ofVienna days, and drank tea and ate tiny barley
cakes in a cafe under the trees. We wandered, when evening
came, in the woods which stretched endlessly beyond the park,
by the banks of the Moskwa river, and went too far, for the
park was closed when we returned to it and our only hope, if
we were not to be stranded, was to cross the river by rowing
boat. lmmediately there rose up one of those heated, excited
altercations in which the Russians excel: they flare up like a
sudden prairie storm and then are gone again. We managed to
hire a boat, but five of us in the poor little craft brought the
river to within an inch of the gunwale. The grandmother's cup
was now full. She entreated me to tell her whether I could
swim : there was no mistaking the fear of death by drowning
in her eyes. I assured her I could , and if we fell in I would save
r 86

' N O THING IS INNO CENT '

her. 'It is not for myself, I think,' she replied with dignity, 'but
for the boy. If we sink, promise me that you will save him.
Promise me !' She clutched my arm and demanded the promise.
I promised, and smiled at little Alexei who sat, half asleep,
dragging his wrist in the water. 'If no one rocks the boat we
shall be all right,' I said. Gingerly I took the boat upstream to
the bridge where there was a landing stage and so we came
safely to the tram station again. The grandmother, who was
now quite reconciled to me, clutched my hands in speechless
thanks and kissed them : she was convinced I had saved them
from a watery grave or from arrest for being found in the woods
after dark. Alexei preened himself on the fact that his friend
alone had been able to row. We returned to their flat and drank
the battle of wine I had taken as a present, and then, with their
eyes all large and sad upon me because I could go as I chose
and return to England when I wanted, I steeled myself to say
goodbye to the suddenly desolate boy and to his mother whose
melancholy beauty robbed me of all set speeches.
As we walked down the midnight street, almost deserted
under the stars, past the twisted marzipan spires and dames of
St. Basil, I mentioned that I had not seen the boy's stepfather,
and there seemed to be some mystery about him. My discreet
companion looked stealthily about him as we crossed the empty
Red Square. There seemed to be only one other occupant, the
sentry outside Lenin's tomb.
'He is far away. He is in trouble. I beseech you not to ask
more or even to say more.'
His heartfelt and fearful tones moved me deeply as I walked
beside him. The high wall of the Kremlin seemed a symbol of
the closed and secretive world into which I had strayed.
'Lydia?'
'Did you notice her cough?' I had indeed : it was small and dry
and irritating. 'Poor child, she is ill. She does not know how ill.'
I kept silent, 1,1nable to ask, a new grief welling up in me.
'I understand your silence. It is, of course, tuberculosis. She
is quite doomed, poor child.'
'What will become of the boy?' I asked in a low voice.
'The grandmother will fight fiercely for him. She is all he
can depend on. It would have been hetter if he had stayed in
England.'
I clasped his hands and left him near the hotel.
1 87

'

N O T I I I N G IS I N N O C E N T

'

' Say nothing,' he pleaded fearfully; 'Swear to mel And noth

ing of where you have been, good friend.'
All the sadness of Russia was in our helpless parting, and I
went wretchedly into my hotel, where Vera was waiting for me
with a fiery anxiety. I saw her pacing the reception hall with
angry steps as I went through the swing doors.
'\Vhere have you been, Comrade Paul?' she asked me. 'It is
not good to roam about Moscow at night when you don't know
the language.'
I looked at her with irony.
'l'm not a child, Vera. Come on, get us both a drink.'
'But l'm responsible for you.'
'Why,' I said brightly, 'l've been to the Park of Rest and
Culture and tried to walk back and lost my way. But the
Kremlin is most beautiful under the starlight.'
But it was clear that she had very great doubts about my
story and bit her nails furiously and would hardly speak to me
as we drank together and thawed only slowly during the next
day or two as it became clear that my absence was not to be
officially visited upon her.
I mentioned on the train to Rostov a few days later a little
about my visit to the Jew who knew so much about Alexei's
past, but I kept silent about Kirinov's troubles or Lydia's
disease or our sad excursion together.
'You fool,' he groaned, throwing himself about with the
exaggerated emphasis of his race. ' Can't you see if it becomes
known you may hurt them. It is absolutely forbidden in this
crazy land to have foreign friends. When you appeared on the
doorstep like that, unannounced, they must have thought you
were from the OGPU-yes,' he went on, at my look of incre
dulity, 'planted on the ship to worm your way into the con
fidences of the family through the boy.'
I made a gesture of violent anger.
'But why, why ! In heaven's name why?'
'Because the mother has been in England, so has the boy.
So has the husband. Perhaps not always discreet letters.
Anyone who does anything unusual like leaving Russia and
coming back is suspect. Anyone. They even suspect their am
bassadors. They don't trust them any more.'
'I don't believe it,' I cried, unbearably angry because I knew
in a flash of bitter understanding that he was speaking the truth

J 88

' N OT H I N G IS I N N O C E N T '

and I was enraged by my own stupidity. 'This is a socialist

country, isn't it? Not a prison camp? Isn't anything innocent
any more?'
'Nothing is innocent here, absolutely nothing. They even
imprison people just for being subjectively guilty.' And then
he moved off quite abruptly in order not to be compromised
by talking to me, because he saw the lean young man who
was the party spy coming up the train corridor. From that
moment I was certain he had once lived in Russia and was
frightened.
I went off in a gloomy rage to my bunk and lay there
watching the scenery swirl by. There were birch woods and
little grassy clearings with streams meandering through them.
They slid past like a film. After them came half-ruined peasants'
huts and girls with bare feet, wearing shawls like Lydia's,
but that was all they possessed of her, driving cattle along
muddy tracks. One shut one's eyes and the scene faded out,
then opened them again half an hour later, and still the same
'
scene was travelling past. Sometimes a half-naked child
instead of a girl bad come to drive the cattle. Two hours later
and still the same clearing, wood and village glided past.
Two days later it was still the same. Then the woods became
scarcer, and orchards more frequent and then at last we rolled
on to the open steppes in a heat like fire reflected from brass and
there one found just nothing. The plain was like the sea: it
bounded one on all sides. No tree, no bush, no house, no river,
no children driving cattle. Only the uncut corn, or the bare
stubble, or the uncultivated waste. Present! y, in the far distance,
something lonely and immense swung and shimmered in the
sky. It hung there for hours, growing apparently no larger and
appearing to circle around us. After an age one decided it was
growing bigger: it might even be a building-a palace, a
temple, or a pillar into the sky. One's eyes strained towards it,
longing to identify this only other thing which human hands
had made, which kept one company on the steppe. A sky
scraper, we said, later on 'a factory', but finally the moment
came when we could be sure that it was a grain silo, in dis
coloured concrete, standing up like a giant milestone, with a
dingy huddle of prairie buildings round its knees. And when
the train stopped beside it the silence and the intolerable heat
came down with a swoop. So little stirred that we could
r 8g

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

imagine that we heard the sizzle of the sun striking the bare and
sandy soil.
The forsaken little family was left far behind. Why should
they have to suffer so? Why? Why? It was impossible that any
one should care what one or two human beings did, or did not
do, in the endless ennui of the Russian plain. What did it all
matter? When I got to Rostov, I decided, I would take the first
opportunity that came my way to get drunk. Alas for my inten
tions ! The first, the second, and even the third bottle of
Caucasian wine I ordered was full of shoals of fties. Even fties
were liquidated in Russia.
It is proper here to write the postscript on my Russian
experiences though it means anticipating my story by a
few years. For a long time the visit remained the central
experience of my life, and I was constantly trying to reconcile
in my own mind the contradiction between the fervour and
energy devoted to socialist construction, and the unhappiness
to be divined wherever one scratched at the surface. I could not
then see that they were both aspects of the same spiritual state,
and seldom spoke about adventures so baffiing and strange,
except to friends by the fireside at night.
I maintained contacts with official organizations like Cen
trosojus because through them I gathered the materials for my
economic study. The greatest difficulty lay in the collection of
Russian statistics : I had not delved far before I realized that
they were unreliable, and often made meaningless because the
basis of accounting was constantly changing. Thus, for ex
ample, in such a matter as public catering, one annua! report
would say that in the year just ended the Co-operative Mave
ment had exceeded the planned figure of X million meals by Y
per cent. If then one turn ed to the records of the previous year
to see what progress had been made one would find reported
only that gross turnover of A million roubles had been exceeded
by B per cent. It was even worse where such things as market
gardens, potato acreage or treacle production were concerned
for if one year the estimate was in poods, the next it would be
in roubles, and the third in terms of the labour employed. At
first I assumed that my difficulty in arriving at an exact picture
was due to my own ignorance ofsources. Somewhere, I thought,
there will be a definitive body of published statistics through
which I might reach the truth. But I sought in vain for such
1 90

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

tables. However, by reading reports and speeches, I made some

ingenious conversions and laid hold of statistics not published
in tables, and so compiled statistics of my own which met the
case. When I showed them to Ginsberg, at the London end of
Centrosojus, he congratulated me on them and said eagerly
they were precisely what he himself had been wanting for a
long time, and he was certain Moscow would be pleased with
them too. I was reluctantly brought to wonder whether Moscow
really knew the state of its own economy if my haphazard
tables were going to illuminate them.
My study, when published, was not taken up by the State
Publishing House in Moscow, as I had hoped it would be,
because it was not lavish enough in its praises, or firm in its
orthodoxy. Ginsberg coldly acknowledged receipt of a copy
when I called on him, saying 'It is necessary to get these things
down to the masses. You must now write a pamphlet, and you
must not spoil the picture of our achievements by speaking
about some little failures. Mter all, they have mostly been
cured by now. Your study is good, but the masses will not
read it, and it is they who must be convinced.' I looked down
my nose at the thought of 'puffing' the Russian co-operative
movement in a popular pamphlet, and suppressing criticism
at the same time. In any case I could not afford to do
any more work on the subject. My study had turned out to be
another labour of love. Unless Moscow changed its mind and
bought up the translation rights it was not going to earn me
more than /;2 5 .
The letter I received from Moscow professors of the Research
Department of Centrosojus was more courteous and friendly.
It is true they started out by describing me as Mr. Pohl, which
suggested that they had never seen the book, but I hoped that
was only the error of a typist. Four pages of their brief were
devoted to the correction of my Marxist errors over N.E.P.,
the role of the peasantry in the revolution, and the under
standing of the tasks of the co-operative movement in the con
struction of socialism.
'We think that the correction of these errors will increase
the value of your book which is an objective and conscientious
attempt to give a correct picture of the conditions of develop
ment of Co-operatives after the Revolution.
'Now a few words about the description of the Co-operatives
191

' N OT H I N G I S I N N O C E N T '

themselves. Throughout your book you stress several times the

weak points of the Co-operatives. In describing a number of
defects-and these clefects undoubtedly exist-we think how
ever that you do not stress sufficiently the fact that the Co
operatives, even with all their defects are fulfilling a great
historical task of creating a new socialized organ of distribution.
Of course there have been, and to some extent now are
(though in a lesser degree) in the Co-operatives, cases of em
bezzlement, thefts and so on, but the main point is that these
defects must not be allowed to detract from the great achieve
ments of the Soviet Co-operatives. Reading your book one gets
the impression that the defects are the main factor in the work
of the Co-operatives . . . . '
But nothing I said about the Co-operatives in Russia, not
even my assertion that absconding with the co-operative till
had become a national industry, which I made at the 1 93 5
Congress of Peace and Friendship with the U.S.S.R., equalled
the astonishing admissions which Zelensky, Chairman of Cen
trosojus, was compelled to make at the trial of the 'Bloc of
Rights and Trotskyites' in Moscow in I 938. Poor Zelensky, he
did his very best for his accusers before he was shot. I can
imagine that, at the trial, he must have been just as earnest
and officious as he was in his Centrosojus office, where he was
so very conscious that what was expected of him was that he
should show himself to be a Selfridge, or rather Stalin, of
trading operations. When one reads the official report of the
trial it is clear that there was nothing against him except that
the organization he was directing was too large, and over
burdened with responsibilities, and served by a careless and
overworked staff. This itself was a cause of national discontent
since the co-operative shops served so much of the population,
but it was an accusation one might have brought with fairness
against every state trust. Zelensky was neither criminal nor
conspirator, but the victim chosen to expiate the blunders of
his commercial empire.
Most gravely he assured the President of the Court that 'out
of 30,000 shops inspected by the co-operative trade sections of
the Soviets and by trade inspectors, there was no salt in 3, 7 00
shops in the first quarter of I 936. Out of 4 2,000 shops, 2,ooo
had no sugar on sale. In the third quarter of I 936, I ,6oo shops
out of 36,ooo had no makhorka.' Again, 'I may mention that
I 92

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

of I 35,000 shops inspected by the Co-operative Trade lnspec

torate, cases of overcharging and defrauding were established
in I g,ooo shops.'
It was very thin gruel, nevertheless, and Vyshinsky knew it,
for the Co-operative Inspection section had been admitting
faults like this (even to me) for some time. A hetter line of
business for the prosecution was to prove that as far back as
I 9 I I , Zelensky had been an agent of the Okhrana. Once again
Zelensky gave the most cordial aid to help to get this thing
proved, but it really was most difficult for all concerned. Not
a single document or letter upheld the charge, and the vague
references in Tzarist police correspondence to the whereabouts
of one Zelensky during the time of his banishment to Siberia,
could be construed entirely in his favour. And when, to save
the collapsing case, Zelensky proceeded, amiably and con
scientiously, to develop theories about the wicked Right
conspiracies he was so markedly repeating parrot-fashion the
analyses of the examining j udges that the President of the
Court cut him short, and told him to speak ofhimselfand not of
others.
Poor Zelensky was doing his best, but what was there to say
except that he worked hard and didn't succeed very well?
Even now he could not get out of the habit of speaking of all
these things as though he were drawing up a report for the
Board of Centrosojus: he found it hard not to go on speaking
of 'we', and Vyshinsky had to tell him repeatedly that he was
not one ofthem-the communist bosses-any longer. Something
had to be produced to save the situation for the prosecution,
and what came out of the bag was co-operative butter. Zelensky
was baffied by this new line of attack. He was even moved to
protest because, as everyone in Russia knew, the co-operatives
did not sell butter in the rural districts, the peasants made their
own, and in I gg6 there were no co-operatives outside the rural
districts ! The truth was that the co-operatives hardly sold any
butter at all. Nevertheless Zelensky had to be shot about some
thing.
T-)shinsky: I'm not asking you what you sell. You were above
all seiling the main thing-your country. I am speaking about
the measures taken by your organization to disrupt trade and
deprive the population of prime necessities. Apart from sugar
and salt, do you know anything concerning butter?
1 93

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

Zelensky: I told you that the co-operatives do not sell butter

in rural districts.
Vyshinsky: You are not a co-operator, you are a member of a
conspiratorial organization. Do you know anything about
butter?
Zelensky: No!
The confusion then grew worse. If a man's life had not been
at stake ane could have laughed at the perspiring efforts to
bring Zelensky round at last to the point where the press of
Russia, and the world, could crunch its teeth on glass. And
though they hardly ever sold butter-Vyshinsky: And was the butter which you sold always of good
quality, or did you try to spoil its quality toa?
Zelensky ( ambiguously) : Yes.
Vyshinsky: Were there cases when members of your organiza
tion connected with the butter business threw glass into the
butter?
Zelensky: There were cases when glass was found in the
butter.
Vyshinsky:-really he brings Zelensky round to this with all
the casuistry which Brer Rabbit devoted to proving that
Brer Possum stole the butter from the spring-Glass was not
'found' in the butter, but thrown into the butter. You under
stand the difference: thrown into the butter. Were there such
cases or not?
Zelensky: There were cases when glass was thrown into the
butter.
Vyshinsky: Were there cases when your accomplices, fellow
participators in the criminal plot against Soviet Power and the
Soviet people threw nails into the butter?
Zelensky: There were.
Vyshinsky: For what purpose? To make it 'tastier'?
Zelensky (somewhere there is a man in him) : That is clear.
Vyshinsky: Well, that is organizing wrecking and diversive
activities. Do you admit that you are guilty of this?
Zelensky: I do.
At last the point had been reached and Zelensky, who
stupidly imagined that the whole thing turned on the high
policies of the Kremlin discovered that he was to die because
a carpenter had sneezed the nails out ofhis mouth when nailing
down a box of butter.
1 94

' NOTHING IS INNOCENT '

What followed was anti-climax. Vyshinsky had nothing else

to go on but these ridiculous admissions to support the accusa
tion that a wrecking organization existed. Even the 54 carloads
of eggs which went bad Zelensky only wrecked 'by hearing
about it afterwards from a subordinate'. Nothing else came
out. Thus in the greatest ignominy the Chairman of the largest
co-operative organization in the world stepped out to the firing
squad. By 1 938 I had long ceased to be a supporter of the Soviet
Union, but when I read with scorn and rage the account of the
ludicrous trial of Zelensky I became its opponent. Who would
ever have imagined, I told myself, that the mighty Bolshevik
Revolution would fall so far as to drag its leaders through a
poorly-rehearsed drama which reminded one of nothing so
much as a Sexton Blake thriller written when its author's
powers of invention were flagging. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was
right and the earth was the lunatic asylum of the universe.

1 95

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Decline of the Y outh Movement

n the year after my visit to Russia my first novel was pub

I lished and at the same time I reached bottom in earning

capacity-;[6o for six months' work. It now seemed impossible,

in so overwhelming a world slump, to find any kind of post
anywhere. At one time as many as five hundred London
journalists were out of work, including men with long exper
ience on London dailies. Sir Robert Donald spoke of setting
up a Press Agency for the Ramsay MacDonald group in the
House of Commons-the National Labour Party-and I was
sent to him as the man who might run it. I was willing to take
the post, despite my political opinions-I was too desperate any
longer to let them stand in the way-but I had no luck, for Sir
Robert died suddenly and my entry to the post died with him.
But there was plenty of unpaid work about, and I recall
tramping about London, with leaky shoes I could not afford to
have repaired, addressing meetings gathered to praise the
Soviet Union. A moment came when, having travelled by
coach to Southsea to sec my mother and young brother and
sister who were there on a short, cheap holiday I found, at the
beginning of my returnjourney, that I had only one shilling and
my ticket. The insoluble problem was-should I buy myself
cigarettes to smoke en route ( I I td. for 20 Players !) and get
out of the coach at Kennington Church and walk home, or
should I save my money and go smokeless for three hours? As
things could hardly be worse I bought the cigarettes, putting
the shilling in the slot machine. Out came the packet, but back
came a shilling from the machine too. I had no hesitation in
taking it: I counted it the sole piece of financial luck in a whole.
r g6

b E C L 1 NE OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT

year. I was distressed that I could not help my mother more,

and grew thin with worry. James Maxton said, when I went to
discuss with him and Fenner Brockway the possibility of doser
co-operation between the Woodcraft Folk and the I.L.P.,
'Heavens, mon, but l'm glad to meet you. For the first time in
my life I can say l've met a chap thinner than I am. ' But for
me the meeting was of most value because he paid for my lunch.
I had been introduced, through a friend at Northcliffe House,
to a young journalist who was leaving there to set up a new
publishing house called Denis Archer. As I had a novel and he
was looking for authors it seemed useful to bring us together.
He read and liked Fugitive Morning and decided to publish it in
his first list and to my very great pleasure we signed an agree
ment at once. I knew nothing about publishing novels, and it
never dawned on me that an advance was customary: I did not
ask for it and was not offered it. I was toa gratified at the time
to be spared the thankless task of hawking the novel from ane
publishing house to another even to think that I might have got
hetter terms. And so it was that, in the beautifully produced
volume of a new house which was determined to make its name,
my novel appeared in the autumn of 1 93 2 .
I began to blush with pleasure when the reviews arrived.
Gerald Gould wrote in The Observer that it was 'so good, so
natura!, so sincere and so courageous' that it ought to make me
a name, and that its 'main claim to notice is that creative
quality which turns moral sincerity in to artistic integrity'.
The Times Literary Supplement said, 'Mr. Paul really does know
the boy mind, and he is wholly sincere in setting down his
knowledge with honesty and frankness', The Saturday Review
said the book had a sustained note of real beauty running
through it, and the Week-End Review described it as a direct,
human and vigorous narrative. There were a few voices raised
in opposition, but they did not spoil the general chorus of
praise, and when it came to the end of the year several critics
spake of me as 'a promising beginner', 'a writer with a future',
or even, ambiguously, as 'a man to watch'. It seemed im
possible to me that in the face of all this praise anyone at all
should refuse to buy my book. A man even rang me up. 'Is that
Mr. Paul?' he said. I said it was. 'Are you the author of
Fugitive Morning?' I said I was. 'Well, sir, I'm really glad to be
able to give you my sincere congratulations.' 'l'm so glad you
1 97

DECLINE OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT

liked it Mr. --, Mr.

l'm afraid I didn't catch your
name.' 'Oh, my name doesn't matter.' 'Well, l'm glad you
enjoyed reading it.' 'Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Paul, I
didn't say l'd read it. I saw the reviews and thought how proud
you must be of them and thought I'd ring up to say-have you
ever thought about life insurance? I'm the representative of the
Sun Life Insurance Company. I'm sure you've heard of us.'
'Well, Mr. Sun,' I said, 'do you have policies printed in dose
black type on four large beautiful sheets?' 'Sure we do, that's
us to a T.' 'Well, Mr. Sun, l've never read one of your policies,
and you've never read one of my hooks, but if you'll read
Fugitive Morning, l'll read one ofyour policies to make us quits.'
He sounded quite offended and never came to see me.
When a month or so had gone by, during which my imagin
ation saw the book worming its way into the heart of a grateful
nation, I began to grow uneasy. Surely Denis Archer should
have given me some information by now about its sales? I
could not even work any langer because of the suspense.
Almost every post still brought fresh cuttings of reviews from
Romeike and Curtice. I used to make calculations on the backs
of envelopes. What was, I asked myself, to begin with, say 1 o
per cent on 8,ooo copies? At last I felt compelled to ring and
enquire.
'Oh,' replied my friend, 'haven't there been some jolly fine
reviews. You must be quite proud.'
'Aren't they good? I hope the sales are good.'
'Well,' he said, in a flat and careful tone. 'Slow, I should say.'
I heard him shout across the room about the sales but I could
not catch the reply. 'Funny that,' he said, ' Exactly 365 copies
so far, one for each day of the year. But don't give up hope.'
I could not continue the conversation because I felt weak
at the knees, I put the receiver down as my head began to spin
and crawled up to my room and lay on my bed feeling quite
ill. So great was my wretchedness that I was unable to come
down to any meals that day, and had to pretend illness to my
mother. Pretend? No, I was ill. I could have died with despair
where I lay. I was going to receive less than [ 1 5 for a book it
had taken me two years to write. Now I really did not know
how I was going to live.
The consequence of this disappointment was that the feeling
of illness I had been fighting off for years grew steadily upon
1 98
--

D E C LI N E OF THE YOUTH M OVEENT

me. The strenuous life in the Woodcraft Folk-hiking with

loaded rucsacs, digging, climbing, swimming and folk dancing
-had brought on an enlarged heart. I did not know this. I
thought of illness as a shameful admission of weakness, and my
Yorkshire stubbornness kept me from going to doctors. When
friends came to see me I received them stretched out on my
bed for it was not always easy to hold up the weight of my
head. I dreaded the fatigue that came on me when I was com
pelled to walk to a tram or a bus. Chain-smoking was not doing
me any good, but it was most difficult to give it up when so
few enjoyments were now within my means.
So it happened that in the summer of 1 933 I broke down.
Eating brought on so much pain that I decided it was hetter not
to eat at all, if that was the way my stomach wanted it. Perhaps
I had an ulcer. I did not care any longer and I went and
stretched myself out on my bed one morning, and gave up
eating, disclaiming any further responsibility for anything at
all. The horse who tried to live without eating died just as he
was getting used to it. I did not wait as long and after three
days of hunger strike decided that it would be, perhaps, as
well if I went to see a doctor. He said mildly that he thought
it was at !east necessary for me to begin eating, and put me on
a milk diet which I began that very evening. He told me to
stay in bed, but this I could not do for my restless despair was
too great and I struggled into the garden every day with a deck
chair.
It was not only with my body that I gave up, but with my
will. The summer was the most glorious England had had since
1 92 1 , and my youth movement was running a Mass Camp in
the Wye Valley under days of tropical sun. I had promised to
be with them, but here I was idling day after day in the garden
in the shade of the pear tree, listening to the overripe pears
thump to the lawn, and watching the ants crawling about their
vertiginous affairs on the rockery. I had to give up trying so
hard, I decided. I had thrown down my gage before the whole
world when I was eighteen or nineteen, and for ten years I had
worn myself so thin with the effort of fighting it-and fighting
myself-that it was painful to sit down for long on my unpro
tected bones. I was pretty far gone, I thought privately, when
I could walk to the end of the street only by the aid of a couple
of sticks, resting on the coping stones on the way. For ten
I 99

D E CLINE OF T H E Y OUTH M OVEMENT

years I had done enough to exhaust half a dozen men

writing, arguing, organizing, presiding, speaking at street
corners, pamphleteering, electioneering, travelling-all in
order to tell people how to run the world. As if I knew! And
here I was, at the very end of my tether, discovering how few
and futile were the results and how barren my life had become.
Then and there under the pear tree, watching the swifts
quartering the sky, and listening to their screaming, I decided
I had had enough. I was through. I had to begin all over
again at the most necessary point, which was to earn a decent
living. Without that, one was less than a man. I had to resign
from the active leadership of the Woodcraft Folk for I was no
longer an adolescent, and I had come to have a horror of the
look ofdeath that was in the faces of middle-aged Germans who
had spent their lives in youth movements-oh those permanent
adolescents with the faces of aged boys ! O ne could not go on
with this jolly camping and singing for ever. I had to curb all
my unpaid and unrewarded work for Labour and Co-operative
'causes' : it seemed now to be of the most doubtful utility: and
find time instead to think and to look around, and to get to
know myself: just then I had no idea how I might do so unless
sitting still under the trees was the beginning of all wisdom.
A friend suggested I might get myself analysed and since,
as he bluntly put it, I hadn't a penny to bless myself with
I might do so through a certain clinic which did it for
nothing in deserving cases. I could not quite see what psycho
therapy could do about my chief troubles-that I hadn't a
penny and my heart was enlarged and my digestion disordered
-but thought anything worth a try. Like everyone else of my
generation I had soaked myself in Freud and jung and, though
at first it had been an intellectual liberation to treat of sexual
problems in the open, in the end the whole intellectual appara
tus of the pathological schools of psychology had begun
secretly to repel me : it seemed to me to be most tainted by that
from which it believed itself to be most liberated. There was
an intellectual dilemma here which I have seldom seen stated.
It can be easily put by reference to Marxism : under Marxist
inftuence the intellectuals of my generation took it as axiomatic
that bourgeois thought, especially political thought, was
inftuenced by the unconscious dass inftuences and assumptions.
It was not, therefore, valid in its own right and had to be
200

D E C LI N E OF T H E Y O U T H MOVEMENT

approached most circumspectly. It seemed to me that in the

same sense the psycho-analytic liberation was only superficially
a liberation: unacknowledged in all its elaborate theorizing was
the morbid sexual origin of the theories themselves. In fact, I
had begun to suspect that psycho-analysis was itself neurotic.
I did not want to believe in the universality of sexuality: it took
the pleasure out of sex as out of everything else: if everything
was sex, nothing was sex. On quite a materialist plane it seemed
to me that there were other energies in the human psyche,
capacities for sheer intellectual pleasure such as the mathemati
cian enjoys in his logical exercises in the abstract, and the
composer in the solution of his problems of form, which were
not solved by founding the libido in sexual energy.
However, in due course I presented my letter to the clinic
and was asked the usual initial questions by a young doctor who
sat at a desk and efficiently filled in forms. Towards the ter
mination of the interview he asked me briskly, 'Tell me-just
to make it easier for us to decide whether there is a case here
we can analyze-is your castration wish directed against your
father or your mother?'
The question reminded me of the one we used to tell labour
public speakers to use against the heckler who persistently
demanded 'Yes or no' for his answer-'Tell me, have you
stopped beating your wife? Yes or no?' It was clearly going to
be decided by the clinic that I wanted to castrate either my
father or my mother and the prospect of weeks of analysis
in which a brisk, professional young man and I would pretend
to discuss this absurdity impersonally was too appalling for
words. This way, I felt sure, I should indeed end in an asylum.
I could only struggle, after that, to bring the interview to an
end as quickly as possible, and went away more deeply de
pressed than I had arrived. I never returned. If there was a
battle to be fought for the health of my psyche, then I would
do it in my solitude, a solitude daily more precious to me.
1 9 3 3 was a year of crisis for me also because Hitler came to
power in Germany. He has gone since, and we have grown used
to the catastrophies of this century, and have forgotten the
extent to which the year 1 933 was a spiritual disaster for
Europe. I had really only one trustworthy instrument of
political analysis then, and that was Marxism, and in terms of
Marxism the coming to power of Hitler did not make sense.
201

D E C LINE OF T H E YOUTH MOVEMENT

The sensible historical expectation ( even on a liberal basis too)

was that the two divided wings of the German labour movement
would come together in time to defeat Hitler. Germany was
almost the test of Marxist theory, for since the Great War she
had passed through one revolutionary crisis after another.
The full fury of the world crisis had broken over her-her
banks were ruined, businesses bankrupt, and one third of her
youth unemployed. Her government was impotent, and her
working dass powerful. One had faith that history was progress,
and that the Marxist parties in this revolutionary situation
would come to power and make the social revolution. It did not
happen: and moreover because the Marxist parties did not
want it to happen. The schism between Social-democrats and
Communists went deeper than the schism between Communists
and Nazis ! One had to swallow painfully the fact that Com
munists and Nazis collaborated in the Berlin Transport
Strike and voted together in the Reichstag, that Communists
declared that it would be an advantage for them if the Nazis
did come to power since that would destroy the Social-Demo
crats, and then the Communists 'would easily reckon with the
Brownshirts'. This showed an irresponsibility verging on
political lunacy, but it was seriously argued, and for a long
time after the Nazis had come to power. The Communists had
a little rhyme which enshrined their revolutionary defeatism
'First the S.D.P., then the N.S.D.A.P., and in the end the
K.P.D.' We heard ugly rumours of a swing of membership
between the Nazis and Communists-and I can remember the
physical pain I felt when at last I had to admit myself that the
stories were true, and that there were elements in the German
revolution of which, up till then, I had been quite ignorant.
Anyway, there the truth was-the greatest proletarian country
had made a revolution against the proletariat. In one day the
home of Marxism had turned Marxism upside down. There was
not a single English socialist who did not feel bewilderment and
fear.
Of course, we made a rationalization of the new German
revolution. (It is still current !) We began to remember that
Mussolini existed, and argued that fascism was the classic
form of the capitalist counter-revolution, the politics of capital
ism in decline, as liberalism was the politics of its expansion.
It was an argument not without sense, and the most neat
202

D E C L I N E OF T H E YOUTH M OVEMENT

expositions on this basis began to be solemnly argued in the

pages of left reviews. I myself gave many lectures which argued
that the existence of democratic institutions stood in the way of
the restoration of the profitability of private enterprise, because
through elected bodies and trade unions wage reductions could
be resisted. To abolish free institutions was the first step
in wage reductions, and therefore a fascist party was the prin
cipal hope of capitalism in decline. It was a nice theory, and we
felt relieved when we had made it, as though we had put history
straight again. If I had doubts then, it was about the behaviour
of the proletariat which, in 1 93 2 and 1 933 in Germany, pos
sessed two large armies formed precisely to resist such a brutal
capitalist solution to the situation. And they did not resist the
coming of Hitler by one shot ! One wing, and that the most
revolutionary, stood cynically aside and by that, in a sense,
aided him! Perhaps the German nation really wanted Hitler !
And say what one likes, the Nazis really behaved like revolu
tionaries in their own right. They sought fanatically to turn a
whole nation upside down, they brought to power new classes
of people, they introduced socialist measures, and threw them
selves with violence against the whole current of European
civilization, going much farther than the Russian communists
in their bitter condemnation of the West. No wonder I began
to ask whether Marxism was a reliable guide to his tory !
I received many emissaries from youth movements of the
Wandervogel type. They wanted the Woodcraft Folk to
support and explain the Nazi revolution to the English people.
They told the story foreshadowed in the correspondence I have
already quoted. They excused Hitler, idealized his Party, and
shrugged away the persecutions of the Jews as journalistic
inventions; they spoke of the new era as the day-der Tag-of
German youth. National Socialism, they said, was a revolution
of Germanness with which German youth was most in sym
pathy : the Woodcraft Folk, which believed in a folk quality in
civilization, ought to sympathize too. They were the same bland,
polite, fair-haired young men as of old, browned by the sun
and wind, the very apotheosis of the open air type my own
movement admired, yet with pockets in their minds one could
not reach. We rejected their overtures angrily. These men were
wretched turncoats, I argued, for it was impossible that all our
comrades of past meetings had gone over to the enemy :
20 3

DECLINE O F T H E YOUTH MOVEMENT

The first public address I gave in the autumn of 1 933, when

I had recovered sufficiently from my illness, was to a gathering
of members of my own movement, to whom I explained what
I understood of German National Socialism and said that I was
certain it meant a second war, for which Germany already
appeared to me to be preparing. This certainty plunged me into
yet another dilemma. Up to 1 933, with some confidence, I
could say that I was a pacifist since the only kind of war in
which I was likely to be asked to fight was an imperialist one. .
We in the Woodcraft Folk had passed a resolution, following
the Oxford students, pledging ourselves not to fight for King
and Country, an evasive declaration which left us free to fight
for anything else. Now, however, with Hitler in power, mur
dering freedom, and hostile to all the things I held dear, could
I be a pacifist any longer if war came?-and I was quite certain
it would. Could I see Hitler victorious over England and do
nothing about it? I remarked to myself the irony that once it
became clear to me that there was going to be another war,
and what kind of a war it would be, I was no longer a pacifist.
In the pages of Middleton Murry's Adelphi I tried to put
down what I felt about the youth movements with which I had
been associated so long. My illness and pending resignation
from leadership of my own movement made me feel that I
could look at this part of my life more objectively now. 'Never
before,' I wrote, 'in history have the gaps between one genera
tion and another been so great. Three hundred years ago a son
could confidently expect that his path through life would be
much the same as his father's. Even fifty years ago this remained
true, except, we may add, that the son hoped to be hetter off.
. . In the orderly sort of world in which this could happen,
parental wisdom, the authority of the experienced, and the
established air of things were inevitably accepted by the rising
generation . . . . Nowadays the world changes its face in a
decade; the society into which children grow up is not the
society of their parents : its assumptions, admissions and values
are different; technical progress has changed life's face and
altered its material rewards, by which the authority of the
passing generation is visibly weakened. Recapitulation of the
experience of the previous generation provides no handle to the
usurping generation to grasp the world they have to live in, and
there comes the inevitable cry for freedom, for the right of
204

D E C LI N E OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT

youth to its own experiences and values. Mixed with much

romanticism and delight in purely physical experience this
forms the basis upon which the Youth Movement was built.'
I was asking not only why did our generation seek its salvation
in youth movements, but why it was that in Germany, in which
they appeared in their most typical and mature forms, they
should have succumbed to the jingoistic and nationalist
monstrosity, the Hitlerjugend, and been absorbed by it. This
seemed such an absolute defeat of the demand of the German
Buende for freedom to fashion their lives in obedience to their
consciences, that I had to make historical sense of it : I came to
the conclusion that the victory of Hitler was a triumph for the
forces the German youth movements of the left and the right
had originally opposed.
This drew down on me a startling answer in The Adelphi
from Rolf Gardiner whom I had first met in John Hargrave's
movement. Gardiner's role during the twenties and early
thirties had been to bring German and British youth doser
together, and in this he had many extraordinary achievements
to his credit, one of which was the bringing of German youth
choirs to England to sing Bach cantatas in our cathedrals. He
was a member of the Freischar youth, most famous of German
youth movements, and his authority in Germany was even
greater than his prestige in England. No man knew hetter the
temper of German youth and I had to take notice when he
said that I had made a typical mistake in overstressing the
lyrical and romantic aspects of the Wandervogel and of
'underrating the epic continuity, classic consistency and
essentially disciplined character of the Buende as they emerged
and developed after I 9 I 8' and that I failed 'utterly to appreciate
the intimate connections between the Youth Movement and
National Socialism'. * He produced many justifications of the
current German view that this was the revolution of the
Youth Movement including the argument that 'quite an
*Later he retracted, of course, when the brutal nature of that regime became
manifest to him. Toa much indeed should not be made of his rather reckless
defence of the Third Reich in its very early days : his attitude, like mine, was ane
of affronted idealism. He, optimistically, hoped that the Nazi regime did enshrine
the aspirations of German youth : I, more pessimistic, believed it defeated them.
When, in Annihilation of Man ( 1 944) , in the chapter entitled 'The Revolt of German
Youth' I sought to trace a connection between the ideals of the German youth
movement and National Socialism, he wrote me a lang letter of rebuke. The
position he had taken up in 1 934 had become untenable: unbearably so since
many of his comrades ofFreischar had by then been murdered by the Nazis,

D E C L IN E OF T H E YOUTH MOVEMENT

astonishing number of Hitler's adjutants were previously

Wandervogel leaders'. It filled me with dismay to find an
English youth leader defending the Hitler regime: if he was
right that National Socialism represented not the defeat of the
Youth Movement, but in a certain sense its triumph, then I
had to make another reading of my own past. The experiences
of young men like me in Scouts, Kibbo Kift, Woodcraft Folk
and similar organizations were not so dissimilar from those of
the Wandervogel. We shared with them the rejection of
European civilization and the hope of a new, and in a sense
more primitive ane. Gardiner's judgment was a j udgment
upon us. Out of the fine and hopeful German youth movement,
had come this evil thing National Socialism. It was not,
perhaps, what German youth thought they wanted, but,
given their standards, it was what they got. National Socialism
was corrupt and perverse, but only in the same way that
Russian Communism was. Both had roots in an idealism
and a sincerity cynically exploited by ambitious leaders to
produce something brutal and inhuman. Why should that
be so, I asked myself continually? The more ane looked at
history, the more ane found this perversion in it. There was a
profound lesson to be learnt about the fatality which attends
all human hopes, and that I was beginning to learn it was the
mark of a new maturity.

206

CHAPTER TWELVE

D eath of a Char

hey were sorrowful years in other ways for the death of

father had been followed by the death of friends :
nothing it seemed was to be spared me in the way of revelation
of the human condition. The first fri end I lost was Eric Green
hill. Eric, like myself, had been an elementary schoolboy who
had left school even a little earlier than I to fight his way
through the world. His mother was a widow, a prim and gentle
soul, who had to struggle hard to bring up two boys in the days
before social services eased that kind of burden. Both boys had
only one passion, and that was the stage. Eric's brother's
talents were more for management, and he came to run dance
halls and cabarets, and achieved sudden fame by organizing
the first pole-squatting competition in London, which attracted
large crowds of sightseers and a police han. At school Eric was
always organizing concerts and plays and conducting school
sing-songs. My first sight ofhim, as quite a small boy, was when
with precocious professional aplomb he conducted the whole
school in the singing of 'There was a little man and he had a
little gun', with appropriate grimaces. In the sculpture of his
face was to be read his destiny, for he had lank, dark Thespian
locks, a large, important rubbery nose, and the most mobile
skin imaginable. As he grew older, he grew more like Irving,
and somewhat conscious of it. He was apprenticed to a jeweller
when he left school and stayed long enough to learn the trade,
when he left that, and fell out of employment, he went as an
usher for a time to an approved school, but had no stomach
for the harsh disciplinary code asked of him, and left that
too. Like everyone else in those days he had his spells of

T my

207

D E A T H OF A C HA R

unemployment. Though he had been, from the very first, one of

the supporters of my youth movement, his evenings were full of
amateur dramatics and he took leading parts in one of the
finest of South London Amateur Dramatic Societies, one run
by the sister of Gordon Ellis. Like many another talented
youngster from the same company, Eric graduated to the 1
West-End stage and so it used to be one of my pleasures in
those years to go and watch him play in 'The Constant Nymph,'
'See Naples and Die,' 'The Cherry Orchard' and ephemeral
pieces of which I have since forgotten the names. An oppor
tunity came to him, after a spell of resting, to join a small
repertory company which toured schools, colleges and village
institutes for about eight months of the year putting on such
Shakespeare, Shaw and Chekhov as they could manage with a
small east. Eric was stage manager as well as male lead, and
this work seemed to him in retrospect, he once told me, to
consist entirely of loading and unloading scenery in the
pouring rain. One or two night stands are no joke, and the
small size of the company permitted no one any proper rest.
During the summer that he fell ill Eric left it exhausted, and '
was grateful for a small part in a revival of 'See Naples and
Die.' He was one of the cafe chess-players. On a wild impulse l
about that time he married a girl in the east and took her l
away on a brief honeymoon : but the marriage did not even 1
survive a week. Something went wrong and his wife left him,
and he never saw or heard from her again in his life.
1
It was when he was full of the misery of this disaster that he
came to see me and we walked the spring woods of Downe and
Cudham where we had so often camped years before. And all
the time we walked, with the scent of bluebell and hawthorn
blowing freshly about the coombes-quite unspoilt then-he
coughed. It was the tiny irritating cough I had noticed in
Lydia Kirinova, and he did his best to suppress it. I had
noticed it on the stage when he sat playing chess and thought
at first that it was 'in the part.'
'Do you think I ought to do something about my cough?'
he asked, stopping suddenly. He looked tired and worried.
'Sounds like a smoker's tickle,' I said. 'I shouldn't worry.'
'Perhaps I ought to go and see a doctor . . .' he said vaguely.
'l 've had itever since that time on tour I carried on with the 'flu.'
I remembered the cough when his mother telephoned me

208

DEA TH OF A CHAR

one day to say that he was in Lewisham Hospital and they

suspected T.B. and could I go to sec him? I went, taking one
of the presentation copies of Fugitive Morning for him, and
back in a few days came a breathless criticism of it. He was a
most shrewd judge of plays and books though incapable of
writing (or even speiling) himself. In the T.B. Ward he looked
well and rested, and was keeping the patients amused by the
stories and jokes which he told with those rubbery grimaces
for which he might one day have been famous. Alas, he had to
interrupt his stories in order to cough. The rhythm of his life
was now determined by the enemy encamped within him.
Every time I went to sec him, he was more gaunt and fevered
still, until indeed it was no longer possible to persuade oneself
that he would live. His desperate mother got him out of low
lying Lewisham to a sanatorium on the Kentish Hills, and there
for a month, in the cold January, he seemed to recover. But he
had a relapse, and came back to Lewisham Hospital to die, a
skeleton now, with only a frail, blue taut skin over his bones
and huge fevered, avid and longing eyes. I was not yet ill
myself, but in a poor state of health, and the visits made me
unbearably sad : it was difficult to be hearty and reassuring
when, though his weakness was so great that he could hardly
lift his transparent hand from the counterpane, he would talk,
through the rasping cough that troubled him, of what he was
going to do when he came out.
The death of Gordon Ellis was more sudden. In the very
first years that I knew him he was still suffering penalties for
his pacifist past : he was in and out of teaching and editorial
jobs, and was often without money or hope. There were times,
as I well knew, when his insecurity and sense of unwantedness
depressed him to the point of suicide. Almost at the moment of
deepest dejection his luck changed and he became the
Education Secretary of the National Union of Teachers . I
used to call on him in his office and wc would find a cafe in
Kings Cross or Bloomsbury, at which to talk and eat. He
married and took a house at Highgate and I visited him there
and met his wife and fine baby boy. At the foot of the stairs, in
a suitable niche, stood the Victor Ludorum cup of his school
days. It was growing difficult to remember now that he
had once been an athlete, for he was short of breath and
puffed when wc went up hills, and was putting on weight, and
o

209

D EATH

OF

A CHAR

smoked too much. But he seemed, at last, to have reached his

destination and a quiet and fruitful life as a union official
stretched befare him.
Although I had been full of despair at the failure of my
first novel, I had written a second, a much hetter one, I thought,
which was not autobiographical. It was the story of a grocer's
assistant living under the shadow of a gasworks who was fired
one Saturday night, and left his wife and took to the open
road. It was a theme to which I had been urged by my love of
The History of Mr. Polly. I, too, wanted to write a picaresque
novel of the open road with a comically unhappy little man
as its hero. I wanted to put something into such a character
of the spirit of my own father, who was just such an unhappy
little man. Yet still it was to be a roaring, rumbustious affair:
I was quite ready to slide into it the novelist's tricks learnt from
Gil Blas, Don Q.uixote and Meriton Latroon. But it did not turn
out like that at all. My Mr. Periwake was not larger than life,
but a little man observed with sorrowing realism. When the
book was published, to a chorus of praise almost as great as
that by which the first had been received (and with sales no
larger) , Ellis rang me up. He had enjoyed it so much he said
that he had written a long letter to me about it: then he had
decided to tear it up, but he would be glad if I would come
and have lunch with him and talk about it. I could not see him for
a few days, and when I did arrive at his office there was a message
to say that he had gone off to Brighton to spend the week-end
with his wife and child, and would I come in on Monday?
I called as bidden but a man at the desk said brusquely,
'Oh you can't see him, he's dead'. I thought this such stupidity
that I began to explain patiently who I was and what Ellis 1
had asked me to do, and that Ellis was certainly not dead 1
but only away for the week-end. The man persisted and,
growing frightened, I went into his office and looked for his
clerk. There I learnt that he was indeed dead. He had walked
into the sea at Brighton and collapsed and died of heart
failure. The clerk and I stared miserably and blankly at each
other. 'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Befare he went he put some
thing on the dictaphone.' He turned it on and from it, in the
hollow and tinny tones of this machine, as though from the
tomb itself, emerged the voice of my friend talking in his
reedy and nervous fashion about the need for the advancement
210

D E A T H OF A C H A R

of the school-leaving age. I turned and fled from the building

and walked desperately through the streets to Charing Cross
Station. I owed him more than I could ever pay for his urban
ity, independence of mind, and genuine friendship. I could
bear nothing more : one could have so much grief and that
was all. After that the mind refused to respond and one grew
simply tired and sullen.
Throughout the weeks in which I lay in the garden
wondering whether I might not travel the same road as Eric
Greenhill (I had heard an indiscreet neighbour say of me
'He's not long for this world, poor chap') I was almost entirely
alone. When the medical students had gone on vacation my
mother went for a desperately needed holiday on my
persuasion that I was not too ill to look after myself. For a few
shillings a week a char, a woman in her late fifties, came in for
an hour or so every day to make the beds and wash-up, and
do my shopping for me. Somehow I must have raised the
money to pay her. She was a nice old soul, brownfaced, with
bright blue eyes, and lean and active for her years. She would
make a pot of tea, and boil herself an egg, when she had
finished 'doing' for me, and then go off on whatever affairs
kept her busy during the rest of the day. They could not have
been very considerable for she lived in one tiny room in a poor
street for which she paid five shillings a week: it was filled with
furniture her mother had left her. I talked to her when she
brought me a cup of tea to my deck chair in the garden, and in
a clipped and reserved way told me about herself. She was
one of the genuine poor for whom Poor Law Relief had been
created, yet she made no use of it. She did a little charring here
and there and earned about a pound a week. She had been
Road-did I know it?
horn, she said, in a house in M
It had a sign outside 'Mangling Done'. I knew it well, remark
ing it in childhood with gleeful superiority, for all the 'Ns' were
written backwards. Her mother, she said, had run that business
and as a girl she had helped to turn the huge mangle in the
shed out in the backyard. She had gone into service, and
stayed in it most of her life. There was a history of quarrels in
her family. When her mother died her brother took all her
mother's furniture, she said (forgetting that she had told me that
her room was full of it) and she had never spoken to him since.
'Where is your brother?' I asked.
2II

D EATH

OF

A CHAR

'Not far away, sir,' she said. 'He's a builder, but I wouldn't
speak to him again not if you crowned me.'
'Don't you think it would be a good idea to make it up?
Wouldn't you be hetter off having a room at his house, if
he's got one to spare?'
'Not if I live to be a hundred I wouldn't,' she replied with
tightening mouth. 'l keep myself to myself.'
I made no inroads at all in to this savage independence.
Some time towards the end of my illness she lost her room.
I discovered it only by accident. She began to turn up at
my house earlier and earlier in the morning, while I was still
in bed. I had given her a key so that she could let herself in.
The first time I heard a clattering in the kitchen early in the
morning I thought that burglars were in the place, or the eat
was chasing a bird among the crockery. I woke at the slightest
sound, and my heart used to beat uncontrollably at unexpected
noises, so to calm myself I shuffied downstairs in slippers and
dressing gown to see what was amiss. When I softly opened the
scullery door she was standing at the sink, her skirt hitched up
round her waist, her shrunken yellow buttocks bare, washing
her smalls in the scullery sink. She bowed her head, mantling,
paralysed with shame, when she saw me there. I retreated
hastily.
It was possible to live the whole day long under the pear
tree, for the sun never ceased to shine, and there was always
a windy glitter of heat and light in the poplar trees, ravishing
me with its beauty. I took my letters and hooks out to the deck
chair, and there presently she found me. She stood uncertainly
a long way off from my chair, my glass of milk in her hand,
her face averted.
'I didn't mean to take liberties,' she said to the rose trees.
'I'm not that kind. But I didn't think you'd mind.'
'Of course not,' I reassured her. 'It must be difficult doing
any personal washing if you've only one room.'
Her face darkened and she said nothing.
'You're free to do any washing you want-1 wouldn't have
come down only I thought it was the eat.'
Morning after morn:ng, after that, I heard her trip up the
back passage and let herself in. I supposed she made herself
a cup of tea and had a slice of bread and butter, for I would
hear the kettle singing. It did not really seem necessary, even
212

D E A TH OF A C H A R

to do a little washing, to come so emly, and I was embarrassed

that she stayed so long in the house, finding things to do, for
I could not afford to pay her more than the minimum we had
agreed : I was j ust about living on charity myself, if the truth
be told. I said something of the sort to her once. A look of
terror spread over her face.
'I'll be glad to come, sir, if it's all the same to you. It isn't
the money, it's for something to do,' she made haste to tell
me, and in the face of her distress I said nothing more. \Vhen
in the garden I thought about her look of fright, it came to me
that perhaps she no longer had a room.
'How is your room going, ' I asked her later on. 'Are you
happy there?'
She stood stock still, staring at the grass, incapable of
answen,ng.
'Have you still got your room?' I persisted .
A flush of dismay spread over her face. ' I wasn't going to
tell you, ' she said. 'You being so ill.'
'And haven't you got another?' I cried. She shook her head,
and at the thought of all her pitiful contrivances to come here
as early as possible, and stay as long as she could, and to wash
herself and her underclothes in the kitchen sink so that she
might remain respectable, tears started in my cyes.
'But how do you live? You must have a place to sleep ! '
She would not look a t me, but stared in misery a t the grass.
'How do you live?'
'I manage, sir, not wishing to worry you, sir, and you ill.'
'Sleep in the kitchen, ' I said. 'Anywhere. You can't roam
the streets. '
For a few nights she slept in the kitchen, but she was so
discreet about it, so unwilling to give trouble, that I could
not have guessed that even a mouse had come into the house.
I think she waited round the corner, where she could see the
kitchen light, and did not venture to let herself in until I had
gone to bed.
Her haunting plight made me so angry with life that it
retarded my recovery.
'How can you live? Can you get a bed in a hoste!?' I kept
asking her. 'Go to the Relieving Officer and ask him to help
you-tell him you've got work, and would he help you with a
room?'
213

D EATH OF A CHAR

'They'll put me in the workhouse, sir. l'd rather die first.'

'Well, go to your brother-he must help you.'
She was as stubborn as a mule, and it was with a hard
expressionless face that she said, 'I'd rather die first'.
The day was approaching when my mother would return,
the lodgers would be back to roost, and my young brother and
sister home from the camp in the Wye Valley. She would not
be able to sleep in the kitchen, and when I hinted so, she said
'I'll manage, sir'. Her pride was such that from that day she
ceased to sleep there.
When my mother came home it was the first thing we
discussed. We tried to arrange something. I was too ill to walk
about, but my indefatigable mother found the poor old body
a room locally for five shillings a week, and together we paid
this for her for a month in advance. We admonished her as
carefully as we could without treading on that awful pride.
' Make yourself respectable and go and see the landlady and
say when you're coming in. You can come and work here, and
have your dinner here. At the end of the month, if you can't
pay the rent yourself, we'll see the Relieving Officer with you.'
Off she went, trying to hold back her tears. With her brother
alive it did not seem exactly our responsibility but what
could we do? Let her go on sleeping on park benches at night,
and perhaps die?
What transpired at her lodgings I do not know. Perhaps
one look at her made the landlady suspect that she was not too
dean. We had a note saying that the room was not available
now and returning the [,I deposit. So the woman was in the
same position still, coming early to us, and living, God knows
how. There were ways of getting through the day. One local
cinema offered matinees with a cup of tea and two biscuits for
sixpence. One could get a little nourishment and three or four
hours' sleep this way. Then many women's meetings took
place in the afternoons, and included in the agenda of most of
them was a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It was the nights,
sleeping under hedges or in doorways, one dreaded to think of,
and the fear she must have had of being arrested.
'She'll get verminous, you'll see,' my mother said. 'I don't
even know whether we ought to let her keep on coming. Not
if she's going to bring things in the house. l've all you to think
of: we'll see her wretch of a brother.'
2 14

D E A TH O F A C H A R

The brother turned out to be hostile even to owning a

sister, let alone helping her at all. He ran a private decorating
business from his small house. He opened the door when we
called on him, wiping the egg and tea hurriedly off his mous
tache, and smoothing his thin hair over his bald head at the
sight of potential customers. He was in shirtsleeves, a soiled
striped ftannel shirt showing under his apen greasy waistcoat.
A baby with grey snot running from its nase hung on to his legs.
He was annoyed to find that we were not customers and grew
aggressive about his sister's plight.
'She's a bad lot. You don't know half. I won't do nothing
and that's flat. Let her go to the R.O. same as everyone else
'as to.'
When I protested angrily that his sister was sleeping in
doorways and would die of it, he retorted with that mulish
look which was to be seen on her face also, 'You've no cause
to tell me what I should do. You mind your business and 1'11
mind mine.'
Even then not all was hopeless. Through a Roman Catholic
charity we secured a bed for her in a hostel, and felt that when
this was accomplished we had done aur best: henceforward
she would be well looked after. Not a bit of it. Though she
disappeared from our ken for the winter I met her again in
the spring. She told me a rambling story about life in the
hostel which, when summarized, came to this : There was a
young girl sharing her cubicle who was not strong in the head.
She had grown quite fond of her and when the girl had fits, and
was made to stay in bed, she cared for her. But ane day as
they were coming back from a walk they saw the sick girl
standing in her nightdress on the ledge of an upper storey,
clasping the statue of the Virgin Mary and Child which stood
in a niche. The women screamed, though the nuns tried to
calm them lest they frightened the girl into falling, and a rush
began for the upper storey windows so that they might save
her. But it was toa late. The girl fell and was killed. This the
old lady said, had so upset her that she couldn't spend another
night in the place. I pressed half a crown into her hand, toa
overwhelmed by the appalling misery of her life to know
what to do or say.
I told my mother, 'Yes,' she said compressing her lips. 'I
wasn't going to tell you, but she's been back at the women's
215

D E ATH OF A C H A R

meetings again I'm told. And she smells now.' Her nose wrinkled
and she shuddered, her fierce Yorkshire respectability out
raged. 'I'm sure she's verminous. I couldn't have her back to
work. She must go to the Relieving Officer. They don't keep
able-bodied people in workhouses if they can get work outside
and live.'
When next I saw the woman and pressed into her hand the
only money I happened to have that day, she still stubbornly
refused to apply for any relief. 'They'll put me away-in the
workhouse. I'd die first.' Tears sprang into her eyes.
For days I would lose sight of her, then meet her again near
the shops. Each time she looked more like a gypsy than ever,
burnt black by living out in the open and sleeping on park
benches in the sun. But her clothes were more bedraggled than
ever, and into her eyes had crept that wild and frightened
light one saw in the eyes of the besprizhorni in Russia. She
shrank a little from human contact now, as if she had become
more of an animal. I pleaded with her to let us take her to the
Relieving Officer and even sent a note round to him, but I
never learnt that anything came of it. For days again she
vanished, then I met her wizened and wild with unkempt hair,
one frosty morning. Her hands were frightfully swollen. 'It's
the cold nights what done it, sir. It's all right in the summer,
but it's not good in this weather.' It was hunger oedema, and
sadly I thought that the end was near. I gave her some money.
Ought I to tell the polict so that they could get her to hospital?
How would they find her? I sent a note to her brother telling
him of her plight. One day I read in the local paper that a
woman had been found in the streets ill with pneumonia and
taken to hospital. Ill as she was she had tried to resist being put
in the ambulance, protesting that she was a respectable woman
and had never been to the workhouse in her life. She died the
following day. We had no more been able to save her than to
save my father.

2 16

C HAPTER T H I R TEEN

Red Po p lar-Grey Unem p loyed

n the railway station platform one morning I was hailed

O excitedly by an old friend, Clifford Troke. My first novel

had not long been published, and he had bought and read a
copy, circumstances enough to make him remarkable in my
eyes. He praised it lavishly, too, and if I did not show much
interest in this it was because I had not recovered from its
shattering failure, and now could not hear its tide mentioned
without being overcome by a speechless misery. People
invariably asked me how it was seiling, especially those who
had never got around to buying a copy, and as I hated admit
ting failure I usually snarled angrily, 'Oh, very well !' and
changed the subject. It must have appeared to some of my
friends that I regarded the book now as one of the less creditable
episodes in my life.
But Clifford, with an impetuosity and eloquence typical of
him, brushed through all my diffidence to discuss the novel
seriously as a work of art, rather than a curiosity it was remark
able I had written at all, and my heart warmed to him and
we talked until my train came in. I was then working on the
second novel and was in despair, and about to burn it, and
I offered to let him read it before it went out. He accepted with
delight and thus became my literary adviser: I badly needed
one-someone who was prepared out of a wider background of
reading than my own to examine critically and appreciatively
the hooks and poems I was writing. I needed a public, in fact,
and leant muchjust then on his generous temperament.
Troke was himself writing rather precious poems under the
inftuence of the French symbolists and seiling magazine
217

R E D P O P L A R-GREY UNEMPLOYED

stories to the Strand and Pearsons, and teaching English to the

staff of Harrods. His charm and high spirits and his colossal
memory, which seemed to need only the stimulus of a word or a
name to bring forth the relevant quotation, made him the
best of company. Quite often secret!y chagrined by his loquacity
and learning I used to mutter to myself, 'Good lord, is there
anything he hasn't read?' We were the same age, and had first
met when he was a slender youth and I was the organizer of a
camp near Ashtead Common: he came with a party of children
which I took over the remains of a Roman villa there. He had
read my volume of poems about then, but had not, I think,
cared for their untutored nature. During my illness his friend
ship was a blessing, for he would come over to tea and talk
me out of my leaden depression. Although his financial
difficulties were then hardly much less than my own, he had
managed to acquire a car, and at a time when hiking and
camping were out of the question for me we were able to
conduct . our inquests on life and literature while he drove
furiously through the !anes of Kent and Sussex. His enthusiasm
for driving a car was hardly less than that for literature, and
while talking of Proust or Flaubert, or regretting the attacks of
prudes on Lawrence and Huxley, he swung us perilously past
cows and cyclists, perambulators and parsons, determined
not to let anyone pass him on the road and delighted to control
both our destinies with a flick of his wrist. The recklessness in
his driving added exhilaration to our talk: for Clifford life had an
added richness if there was a chance of running slap into per
dition with a phrase of Baudelaire or Mallarme on one's lips.
He had a chastening effect on the excess of idealism with
which I was burdened. When I told him of the dismal episode
with the pyscho-analyst, he was robust and brutal. 'I'm a
great believer in the money cure,' he said. 'I'm sure there's
nothing wrong with you that f:soo a year wouldn't cure
straightaway.' He did not leave the subject. 'What you need
what we both need-is a little financial success. It's necessary
for a man's self-respect. One can't behave with a socialist
purity in the midst of the bowling wolf packs of capitalism.
Old Shaw's right, poverty is a crime,' he said. A little later he
set up in Fleet Street his own journalistic agency, the British
American Newspaper Services, which was quite successful
until he grew tired of it, and through it, as my literary agent,
218

RED P O P LAR-GREY UNEMPLOYED

he tried to organize some success for my third novel in

England and America.
One of his enterprises then was to write the life stories of the
famous and infamous for the Sunday newspapers. It was for
this reason that I once found Harry Champion in his office.
I fell on the dear old man as on a lost uncle, telling him the
number of times I, a small boy eating Russian toffees, had sat
at his feet in the Palladium stalls. My praise so delighted him
that there and then, in a stentorian voice, and with his breath
less jigging dance, he began to work through 'Any Old Iron'.
In vain to try and stop him. His voice which had once filled
Collins and the Coliseum had lost none of its power and now
rattled the windows and shook the floor of Clifford's office.
People stood on the stairs to listen and Harry grew so red in
the face with his effort that I was afraid he would burst a
blood vessel.
It was through Clifford that a new career began for me. He
rang me up one day to say that a friend of his, Sam Myers, who
was running a Men's Institute in Deptford, was trying to start
classes for the unemployed in current affairs. He was going to
give talks himself and perhaps l'd like to try too. At the
invitation of Sam Myers I went to Greenwich and gave a
lecture on 'My experiences in Russia' to a hard-hitten bunch
of unemployed watermen and market porters sitting
in the lovely bay room of the Trafalgar Inn (then an unem
ployed centre) . The 1 8th Century bow window jutted out into
the river, and I could hardly lecture for the majesty of the
rivercraft riding the choppy tide under my nose in the windy
October light. The men chewed tobacco and spat, or smoked
shag and listened stolidly, barges and tugs surging behind them
and the fug grew thick enough to choke me. The lecture was
not a success, for I was still ill, and much too nervous, but
other invitations followed fast on this. One was to run two
classes in Poplar, one in the afternoon and the other in the
evening, and when I signed the contract for this I landed
myself with the first regular work for several years. By the
autumn of 1 934 I had built up a full weekly programme of
dass es and lectures and could bank on a regul ar income from
teaching. It made immediately that change in my health which
Clifford had predicted. I was back where I wanted to be, on
my own feet again.
219

RED P O P LA R-GREY UNEMPLOYED

It had another consequence, which I did not understand at

the time. I was at last compelled to read, study and take notes
in a systematic way, especially for classes of students sitting for
examinations. This meant an organized and sustained in
tellectual effort on my part : I read more carefully in politics
and economics than ever I had done before, and prepared
endless lesson notes. Chance threw in my way the opportunity
to turn some of this into print by writing weekly articles on
current affairs. In a curious and freakish way, the intellectual
disciplines to which I should have submitted in my teens were
now thrust upon me as the condition for earning a living at all.
The whole of this work was, I now think, most abominably
paid, but together then it made a total I could live on. It is
almost impossible to explain what a miracle I felt this to be in
my life and how it banished completely the depression my
economic uselessness had made endemic.
Trinity Church in the East India Dock Road, lifting a
classical face to Poplar slums, had been built in Poplar's
shipbuilding days when, a century or more before, Poplar
built clippers raced from India with tea, and later from
Australia with grain. In those days, when Poplar was a garden
suburb which led nowhere save to the marshes of the Thames
and the River Lea, the carriages of the shipbuilders and ship
masters drew up to the church porch in a dignified parade every
Sunday morning. In the I ggo's there was hardly a trace of that
past. Poplar was the borough of the dockers, transport workers,
lascars, and factory workers. Among them ftourished the
powerful radical tradition which had brought the workhouse
boy Will Crooks, and the poor lad George Lansbury, to the top.
The brave and humane fight of the Poplar Guardians at the end
of the First World War for rates of poor relief which permitted
the out-of-work to live had given birth to the title 'Red Pop lar'.
During the General Strike some fierce riots had taken place
along the East India Dock Road, and the Government had
even sent through an armoured convoy to bring the food out
of the docks. The hall at Trinity where I came to lecture to the
unemployed had been used by the Workers' Defence Corps or
'Red Guards' for their drill meetings, and as a first aid station
during the strike.
The incumbent was a Clydesider, the Rev. William Dick,
an emotional and eloquent preacher, full of anger at the
220

R E D P O P LAR- G R E Y UNEMPLOYED

unemployment which scourged his congregation. Unemploy

ment created for Poplar a special human scenery, like that of
a mining village when men are out : at every street corner
lounged men in black clothes, white chokers and cloth caps,
rubbing their shoulder shiny and polishing the brick as they
ate their hearts away in sullenness and hate. Dick was not the
man to sit idle in face of this human suffering. He himself had
been a poor Scots boy, with an unemployed father, who had
worked his way into the ministry largely by his own efforts.
But nothing of the church he made so great an institution in
Poplar now survives. It was first damaged in the Great War
when a bomb fell on a school next door, and massacred nearly
a score of infants. A memorial to them stands in Poplar Recre
ation Ground. In the Second World War, on the eve of the
church's centenary, a flying bomb slid up the nave and blew
the church to pieces. Now "Lansbury," a showpiece of modern
architecture, a part of the Festival of Britain of 1 95 1 , has risen
on the ground where the church stood, and Trinity, in modem
dress, is surrounded by the concrete world of Le Corbusier.
Even the dingy streets which gave the neighbourhood its
character, and which are mostly grass-grown rubble mounds at
the moment of writing, will have gone, their very names
erased. William Dick will not see it, for he died exhausted
not many months after the church was destroyed.
I first heard of William Dick shortly after the General Strike
when he brought over to a Lewisham church twenty Poplar reds
who each made a five minute speech on 'Why I am
a Communist.' That was typical of his courage and shock
tactics. It was no use for Christians to hold up Pecksniffian
hands in horror at the awful views of the proletariat: they had
best meet the rri and find out, he said, what they had to say.
A few of the men I was about to teach had taken part in this
campaign of Dick's to open the eyes of the church to the
passion for social justice among working men : others had
drilled with the Red Guards, or fought the police with stones.
Y et the firebrand character of the place was not in evidence
when I went. Trinity was a vast charitable and social organ
ization. It distributed parcels of food and clothing, and it
organized scores of clubs and meetings for almost every social
need among the people of the locality. Hundreds of people who
never went to 'Services' regularly relied upon Trinity for
22 1

RED P O P L A R

GREY UNEMPL OYED

other human needs. There was even a night shelter, free of

charge, and no questions asked. In the midst of seediest Poplar,
Trinity fulfilled the hospitable and healing role of a medieval
monastery. And William Dick, like a saintly prior, wore himself
out with this unending work of human mercy. He was suffering
dreadfully from rheumatoid arthritis all the days I knew him.
It so crippled him that he was compelled to struggle about
with two sticks, like a man horn that way. He refused to allow
this to destroy him, and only the kind of illness which put him
on his back held up his laborious daily round ofinterviews with
the needy, and errands of mercy among the sick and dying. He
deserves a place among all those Christians who have fought
for the redemption of the East End-Cardinal Manning,
William Booth, Father Graser, Mary Hughes, the Kingsleys
and the Toynbees. It was one of the pleasures and privileges of
those days to enjoy this good priest's friendship and to discuss
with him the people he knew so well.
Though in a sense parishioners of Trinity, my unemployed,
or at least the most vocal of them, were under Marxist or
Anarchist influence, and were inclined to announce their
atheism boorishly in order to express their spiritual indepen
dence, for most of them were in receipt of Dick's charity, and it
was bitter in their mouths. Few church halls can have heard so
much outspoken hatred of Christianity. I never saw Dick
perturbed by this, for he believed that it was part of the
spiritual redemption of these men that they should be allowed
to speak their minds, warped though they might be. This
freedom was, for me, the best possible atmosphere. The
Tuesday afternoon 'free-for-all' became for seven years a
Poplar institution: in the end it drew visitors from all over the
world.
On the day of my first appearance a young fellow in a cloth
cap who stood by the door gave me a derisory look and said,
'You the new lecturer?' I said I was. 'You wait till Bell gets
going on you,' he said with pity. 'He'll tear you limb from
bleedin' limb, mate.'
Bell was a street corner speaker with a remarkable
ascendancy over the men of Trinity.'Someone tried to point
him out to me befare I began my lecture but among a couple
of hundred men I failed to grasp who was the seedy individual
whose wrath I had to fear so much. And Bell kept silent. But so
222

R E D P O P L A R-GREY UNEMPL OYED

greatly did the others fear or admire him that many made
reference to him, turning to the quarter of the hall in which he
lay submerged like a whale getting ready to blow. 'I expect,'
said one young man with a pedantic manner, ' Mr. Bell will
have something to say about this lecture and so I'll keep my
remarks short.' It all began to look like a carefully staged entry.
Presently there was a stir and a craning of necks and the
chairman nudged me. 'That's 'im,' he said, as a stumpy little
figure, with a face as fiery and as crumpled as a shiny red
cabbage, rose to speak. He fixed a baleful yellow eye upon me
and began in the broadest Scotch, 'I have never in all my
borrn days leestened to sech peetiful rhodomontade from a
peed agent of the capitalist dass.' There was a stir of pleasure,
to which he warmed, though he misunderstood what the
great shout oflaughter meant every time he referred to me as a
'peed agent'. His Scots grew more broad as he gathered way,
but I could not escape awareness that I was being denounced
with all the fervour and wealth of imagery of a Scotsman
brought up on the Bible. I was a whited sepulchre, it was in
vain for me to gnash my teeth and rend my garments, my
words were howlings in outer darkness, and the day would come
when I would be delivered up to them in judgment, and this
was apropos of a denunciation of all authority, including and
especially mine, as a sin against the light. I had to smile at the
irony of it all. How often I had sat where Bell was sitting, to
spring to my feet to make a denunciation of capitalism, more
tempered, but perhaps not so very different. Now I was on a
platform dressed in the slender authority of one paid to go to
talk to the unemployed on whatever subjects he chose. By that
small promotion I had become, for Bell at least, the symbol of
all the authority he detested. I could hardly explain, or point
out on what small beer he was wasting his energy but refused
to answer his tirade, on the grounds that personal abuse got us
nowhere, he was no more forced to attend my lectures than I
was forced to give them. If he didn't like me, he could stay
away. At that with a bad tempered dignity he left the hall.
But no one followed him, and after a decent interval he
returned again, prepared to renew his attack. By that time I
had won the friendship of the men.
My chairman for many years was a little man called Charlie
Whistle, a stocky, ugly character whose fierce appearance
223

RED P O P L AR-GREY UNEMPLOYED

quite belied his gentle manners. Unlike many of the dockers

who came to my meetings he was not tall, but as broad
shouldered and bow-legged as a miner. His lips were thick and
huge, like a negro's, and his nose, flattened in some forgotten
fight, emphasized this formidable look of his. His scalp, eye
brows, moustache, sprouted an aggressive white bristle : chin
and throat were nearly always covered by a three day hoary
growth. He was grubby, but by rule rather than laziness, for
he had a theory that it was harmful to take baths, especially
hot ones. 'When you boil an orange, matey,' he said, which as
a matter of fact I never did, 'you ought to take a look at the
oils that come out of the skin. The human skin's just the same,
full of essential oils we spend our lives boiling out.' In winter
therefore he bathed only under absolute compulsion, but in
summer he went to the swimming baths, but as he also had
theories about the chlorination of water, he preferred to go
down to the Thames at Limehouse and swim with the street
arabs from a sunken barge, or sit in the sun. He left me far
behind in trying to live by theory. 'Always sit in the sun,' he
said. And because of this, though he was my chairman, I
would often lose sight of him, and look round to find that he
had observed a sunbeam striking down to the floor from
skylight or window, and had padded softly across to it in his
plimsoles, taking his chair with him, and there he would sit
absolutely immobile in it, his head sunk on his breast, his
hoariness turned to stone, the dust motes dancing above him,
Rodin's thinker grown old and set in a stage lime.
He was a legend with the men. They seriously believed that
he had a private source of income and once a year dressed up
as a toff and went up to the West End 'for a proper night-out'.
And this legend was based, not on fact, but on the complete
freedom from worldly ambition he displayed. He was
unmarried, lived in a single room, and to talk with his friends
was his whole ambition. He always waited courteously for me
to give him a fag in the tea break after my lecture. If I forgot
he would remind me obliquely. 'Funny how you like a fag at
certain times. Sort of comes on you.' And he would pat his
pockets for the cigarettes we both knew he couldn't afford to
buy. But when he got to know me well he felt he could joke
about it. 'The only reason I'm your chairman, you know, is
because I get a fag at tea-break out of it.' And he went into
22 4

RED P O P LAR-GREY UNEMPLOYED

great cackles of laughter meant to hide his fear that I might

seriously imagine him to be a cadger like the rest. It was
because Whistle was not a cadger that the legend of his private
wealth had grown up.
'Look at him,' he would say, in a stage aside, when a noisy
red was holding the floor. 'Shooting off his mouth when
everyone knows there's no bigger cadger than him. They're
all a lot of cadgers. That's all they come for. If you didn't give
them a cup of tea, they'd never come.' He would survey the
sorry collection of down-and-outs befare him and, seeing
himself in them, work himself into a hate no capitalist of the
Daily Worker cartoons could ever equal. 'All they're good for
is to turn good food into manure. The only use they'll ever be
is when they become human manure themselves. ' Of one
hulking man who was like a deflating balloon, with laps of
soft, rubbery fat falling in creases over his face, who was his
particular detestation, he would say to me. 'He's a pathological
case. You should've seen him a few years ago, a hulking great
man who could lift a house. Now look at him. He can hardly
shamble about. He isn't ill, it's j ust his brain's going soft.
Fiddles about with little girls. They're all pathological cases,
the whole lot of them. Look at that fat lout too, the cissy. I'd
kick his arse for him. But I'm no different: pathological too :
human flotsam and jetsam.'
It was bad for him to be chairman : it detached him from
the mountain of unemployed flesh befare him, from their
soured, soiled clothes and stale, hopeless minds. How they
enraged him ! Tears would start in his gentle eye. 'What can
we do, Mr. Paul?' he would ask me. 'What on earth can we do?'
He himself strove continually against the hopelessness of his
life. He spent hours in the public library, and the results of his
reading sprouted in flowery quotations from Shakespeare or
Tennyson carefully copied into an old notebook. He tried to
read psychology, and got hopelessly tangled over the difference
between the conscious and the unconscious. How on earth,
he said, if the unconscious was unconscious could anybody be
sure it was there? But the jargon of psycho-analysis was
constantly on his tongue. 'Workers of the world unite,' he
would grinningly proclaim to the men, 'you have nothing to lose
but your inferiority complexes.'
The Pitts that Charlie Whistle delighted to abuse was (when
p

2115

RED P O P LAR-GREY UNEMP L OYED

I first came) a young man, flabby from under-exercise but

fresh-complexioned, who had been unemployed for three or
four years. This extraordinary youth had an elaborate and
ornate way of speaking, like a stage curate: he even stood
beaming at us from over the tops of his spectacles and clasping
his hands fondly across his belly. He maddened the men. They
could not bear his prosy, repetitive way of talking, and his
infuriating use of phrases like 'my good fri ends' and ' my dear
sir' . If some one interrupted his constipated delivery with
'Put a sock in it' he was injured innocence in a moment. He
would stop and peer at the offender, and turn in a ladylike
huff to the chairman and say, 'Of course, Mr. Chairman, if
l'm to be insulted-if, I say, when l'm only doing what is
asked of us that we should do, calling the attention of the
meeting to the consideration of some of the factors which in my
humble opinion-and of course it is only my own humble
opinion-l'm well aware l'm not as brainy and haven't had
the education of some here-but that's neither here nor
there-I was saying if l'm not allowed to draw attention to
considerations which it devolves upon us to study if we are to
make the most of what I must say was a profound, most
comprehensive lecture . . . Well, Mr. Chairman and dear
friends, as I was saying, it is only proper democratic procedure
to ask you . . .' but what more he wantd to say would be
drowned by the groans of the audience.
Once a year Pitts became conscious that time was slipping
by, and he had no job, and his educational deficiencies were as
enormous as his opportunities were great. Now if only, he
argued to himself, I can map out for myself a plan of study and
stick to it, then within a year or two I shall have equipped
myself for the responsible post suited to me. He would button
hole me and implore me to work out for him an integrated
course of study. And one or two of us would launch him on a
series of classes in local evening institutes. But two months later
his attendances would begin to flag. He had a cold. It was a
bad night and he didn't feel like turning out. His mother was
ill. He had a grievance against the tutor. Then, finally, with a
burst of confidence he would admit that he was no good. 'Mr.
Paul, you know what l've come to think,' he would say in his
ingratiating way. 'Between you and me it's ridiculous
to imagine that you can make good the loss of . . . er, er . . .
226

RED P O P L A R-GREY UNEMPLOYED

systematic instruction when you're young. The brain is soon

bowed down with fatigue. Perhaps, Mr. Paul, you have found
something of the same kind yourself?' He would bend forward,
peer through his gold-rimmed spectacles, and smile diffidently
and sadly at me for all the world himself like a down-at-heel
professor.
Pitts fell in love. This transformed him. He went about with
a heightened colour and flashing eyes, in a furyofdetermination
to redeem himself. Languages, shorthand, euclid, were all
attacked with zeal. He never stopped talking now. He washed
his face, combed his hair, and appeared in pressed suits, like
an adolescent in love for the first time finding the world flower
with his own spirit. Nothing was impossible, even getting a job.
But he was not going to waste his time on any kind of job. He
would study first, perhaps take a degree, and get a really good
job. 'For instance, Mr. Paul, I should very much like to do the
kind of lecturing that you are doing. It seems an infinitely
noble thing to have a hand in the uplift ofhumanity.' This love
affair worked up in him such a state of cerebral excitement
that I began to fear for his reason. One afternoon he came into
my dass while I was still speaking, looking as though he had had
something to drink, though it was only love. He changed his
position three times, each time with profuse and blushing
apologies to the people around him, then went out, came back,
went out again. Then he came in again when I had ended my
lecture and began a speech full of rhapsody and rhetoric, which,
though showing considerable mastery of words, made no sense
at all. In full flow he broke off in confusion and fled from the
room khocking over chairs in his escape. When the lecture was
over he came to see me with tears in his eyes. ' Mr. Paul, l'm
ashamed of myself. I must confess, and hope you won't laugh
at me, that it's because l'm in love, and if you had ever been
unemployed yourself and in love you would be a ble to see the
full tragedy of that situation. If I had the courage, Mr. Paul,
I would cut my throat.' I sighed deeply and took him out to
tea at Lyons opposite the end of Blackwall Tunnel.
Week by week his excitement died down. He ceased to wash
and shave so carefully, and his clothes lost their neatness. I
ventured to ask him one day about his girl. He went very still
and looked sideways at me. 'Oh,' he said, with an assumed
casualness, watching carefully the effect of his words, 'that's
227

R E D P O P L A R-GREY UNEMP L OYED

all over, Mr. Paul. I couldn't keep it up, the girl wanted me to
change too much. I don't see why one should : if you love
someone you should love them as they really are, not try to
change them.'
Pitts was often at war with an old man called Withers who
attended several of my classes. Withers had been a ships'
carpenter who had travelled the seven seas. He was a dandy,
with a neat white imperial, and dark suits always double
breasted and faintly nautical in cut. Where Pitts was slow and
methodical, he was quick and excitable. He walked on tiptoe
with mincing little steps, as though about to break into a
dance. He worked the lantern when I gave a show of slides, and
while his excitability always caused him to do something
wrong, his pleasure at doing it at all prevented him from
noticing his mistakes. He was rather deaf too. 'You've got it in
the wrong way up, you old b
,' his comrades would yell.
It took some time for this to penetrate his deafness. 'Who're
you calling an old b
,' he'd yell back, squaring up to
fight the lot. Then, peering angrily at the screen, through the
wreathing tobacco smoke, he'd say, 'Seems all right to me.'
A shout would convince him, and thoroughly rattled he
would burn his fingers and growl oaths into his imperial, and
dance about in a rage. He had the most uncertain temper of
any man I had ever met. He would lean against my desk and
talk nineteen to the dozen about something my lectures had
stirred up in his decaying mind-he was always inventing
experiences in various parts of the world which corroborated
what I had said, and he invented them to please me-and then
in the middle of a sentence he would forget everything and
walk away, out of the room, without a word of explanation or
a backward look. Roused by an argument he would prance
around, wave his arms and shout, ready to do violence to all
comers. One day, the slowness of Pitts in argument so goaded
him that he turned round and plastered him on the nose and
went off, without waiting to be called to order, treading the
hall like a guilty eat. Pitts behaved with the charity and
understanding born of his quarrels with his father. 'Let him go,
the poor old sod,' he said. 'Anyone can see he's crazy.'
The young man who surveyed me so contemptuously on my
first arrival, telling me that Bell would tear me limb from limb,
took a fatherly interest in me from that day forth. He could
228

R E D P O P LAR-GREY UNEMPLOYED

not understand what a chap like me was doing down in

Poplar when I might (as he innocently supposed) be earning
the fabulous incomes which naturally came the way of con
tributors to the Sunday papers. If I'd been a parson he could
have understood it, but I wasn't. I would aften catch his
puzzled and accusing stare when my sympathy and friend
liness were most in evidence, or when I was simply enjoying
myself among them. It was the resentful uncomprehension of
the small boy who finds his father, hitherto stern and remote,
trying in the saloon bar, amid the laughter of his boon
companions, to pick a matchbox off the floor with his nase. He
would suck at his teeth, or pick them with a matchstick, and
probe. 'Do they pay you a lot for this?' My shrug was eloquent.
'Beats me why you come. All this lousy lot ain't no good for
you.'
He had a certain disdain of speaking in public, and one day
came to me privately after the meeting and said, 'It's all very
well for you to talk, but have you ever seen how we live in
Poplar? You don't know 'alf, anyone can tell.'
'Well, why don't you show me? You can talk a lot yourself
ifit comes to that. What about taking me round?'
And with Searle-for that was his name-on many a
Tuesday afternoon after my lectures, I probed into the festering
tenements and houses of Poplar. In same tenements there was a
communal tap next door to the water closet on every landing,
and the stairs, the haunt of snot-nosed babies, stank with piss
and were sometimes scrawled with filth. There we met the
haggard women who were compelled to carry every drap of
water they needed for washing, cleaning and cooking from the
tap to the little stone lobby which passed for a kitchen. Each
and every one of these women had the telltale gestures of
harassed poverty-the quick effort to wipe her hands on her
apron befare shaking hands, and the mechanical motion of
brushing hair from her face with the back of the hand.
'Keep yer 'at on,' Searle woul say, 'or you'll be taking
bugs home to roost.'
He felt the necessity to punish me.
'Yer,' he'd jeer, 'that makes yer sick, don't it? But what
abaht us who have to live in it?' And truth be told, his own
tenement dwelling where he lived with a pale-faced wife and
one sickly little boy who used to come each time and press
2 29

R E D P O P L A R-GREY U N EM P L OY E D

himself to my leg, and hold the tighter when he thought I was

going away, was little hetter than the worst. He was not to
know that I had known Poplar in my boyhood, and that my
uncle had been a dustman in the borough and had lived in a
tiny terraced cottage, where the stink of cabbage was in the
hallway, and the dark paper peeled like a fungus from the
wall in the blue, supernatural light of the fishtail gas j et. The
kitchen beyond, with its glowing range, and the bobbled plush
curtain hanging from the mantelpiece, the pipe rack, the row
of polished boots and shoes in one corner, was cosy and warm,
but the dark smelly passage was a horror it took all my courage
to negotiate and my spirits would drop noticeably as the
moment for going- home drew near, and I knew that I would
have to stand in the passage kissing goodbye to my aunt and
uncle, who stood there unaware of the wavering gloom and evil.
My uncle mistook my reluctance to move from the kitchen for
affection and would hug me dose and say, 'You can stay if you
like, Les. We could make you a bed in the parlour.' But I
dared not stay.
The dingy and squalid streets of Poplar with the uniform
rows of two storey cottages in grey brick, surmounted by a
common parapet from which the paint was ever peeling, gave
the borough its own sad and faded character. But now that I
came to look around many of the cottages, I had to admit that
they were not so bad as my childish memories had depicted
them. They were possible dwellings so long as they were not
divided between two families. The rooms were small and
ceilings low: the parlour windows, which had to be well
curtained since they let upon the pavements-did not admit
enough light. But they were homes, compact, united and
private, and in many a well-scrubbed backyard the pigeon
fancier built his lofts, the dog-lover reared his whippets and
greyhounds, the motor-cycle fanatic assembled and dissembled
his machines, or the gardener, making the most of his space,
arranged his boxes of tulips and wallflowers in ascending tiers
and terraces around the party walls, while in their own corner
the children scribbled on the stone flags and dreamed their
fragmentary dreams. In high summer back and front doors
would stand open, and the old people would bring out their
chairs to sit on the pavements and catch the moving current
of air, and if the sun struck hotly down upon them, cross the
2 30

R E D P O P LA R

GREY UNEMPLOYED

street to sit by their . neighbours and read the Evening News for
the racing. The centre of the street was the heart of
the community and down its centre wheeled and turned the
saraband of shouting boys on bikes, children with home-made
scooters painted with the war signs of their street gangs, girls
with bright, swinging skirts and dancing eyes at hopscotch or
skipping, watching out of the corner of their eyes for the
frankly-appraising glances of the boys, and the disapproval of
elders.
To visit the worst slums, where human families rotted in
malodorous caves of rags in one great central bed, was penance
enough to destroy my peace of mind for weeks : but to walk the
streets was poetry in the autumn evenings when the driving
rain made golden snakes writhe along the wet pavements, and
the shawled and overcoated figures who ran along them to
fish and chip saloons were drenched as much by the Niagaras
of light from the East India Dock Road shop-windows as by
the ubiquitous rain. There were evenings when the sunset
piled itself in dusty orange masses over the streets, or when
the fog came down from the river and the blinded vessels
hooted 'morne et sombre' as they groped towards the docks of
Millwall and Rotherhithe. Here and there, then, the street
lamps picked out of the pearliness a doorway straight out of
the 1 8th Century, a gate of handwrought iron, a wall-bracket
or a cobbled entry to a passageway that took one back to the
Poplar of the shipwrights.
In that lost land, now destroyed, of a London built in the
time of Dickens, the strangest night was Guy Fawkes night.
For weeks one knew of its coming, for the urchins paraded the
main streets pushing soapbox barrows mounted with guys,
they themselves togged up like oriental demons, with masked
or blackened faces, artificial eyes which goggled evilly, and
coloured costumes-the little boys in red or green skirts and
old silk blouses, and their sisters in dad's east-off pyjamas
and grandmother's feathered hats-and they begged persistently
and without shame for 'a penny for the guy', lifting bright
painted lips like eastern paramours. A few days before Novem
ber sth police notices appeared informing the populace that it
was against the law to light bonfires in the streets. But where
were the fires to be lit? Poplar had then no waste places like
bombsites. Its houses were fitted into its small space as tightly
23 1

R E D P O P L A R-GREY UNEMPLOYED

as a bunioned foot into an old cracked shoe. So the bundles of

broken fish boxes had to be assembled secretly in backyards
and brought out into the street when the coast was reported
clear by the scouts standing at street corners. Presently the
blood-orange flames crackled about the white boxes and the
smoke belched palpably up between the squat cottages like a
gun puff. One bonfire was the sign for many. The smell of
burning timber was everywhere in the streets. The houses,
catching the fire on their windows, came alive in the November
murk, and full of watchers. It was a grotesque medieval world
that they saw, one fashioned for Pieter Brueghel to paint, made
strange by the faces of the dancing children glowing in the
flames, and the opaque mass of the shifting darkness of the
street, which closed in with a chill every time the fire died down.
Catherine wheels flared on window ledges, and crackers leapt
along the gutters after the shrieking girls, and now and then,
from an old beer bottle, the occasional rocket which penury
afforded leapt with a hiss and a golden are above the houses.
If one stood on a roof or a tower, all Poplar was studded murkily
with the bonfires of a night sacred to children.
Against them the law on bicycles impartially made war. It
swooped down with furious whistles and cries, in dark blue
clothes and cloaks, like batlike creatures from a Manichean
underworld which fought against the light, scattering the
children, and with kicks and oaths hurling the charred frag
ments about the street in explosions of sparks and smoke until
the fire was out. Then mounted again, and pedalling with
elderly determination, the law set course for the next beacon of
light and smoke ascending above the roofs. So the divine battle
between the Light and the Dark went on. Yet for every
policeman, Poplar must have mustered a thousand children : it
was a battle lost before it began.
In I 933 and I 934 the general mood of the unemployed in
Poplar was Communist, four years later it had become Fascist.
The psychology of this switch was quite simple. It was rooted in
the bitter feeling that the Labour Party could offer them
nothing, it was the party of the employed worker, and Russian
Communism was not to be trusted because it had ended in the
purge and massacre of its own leaders. Fascism alone
offered an immediate course of action. and did not hide its
lust for brutality behind a smokescreen of socialist piety and
2 32

R E D P O P L AR-GREY U N EM P L OY E D

idealism, like the Communists. Of course, the unemployed

formally condemned Hitler, but they admired strength, and the
merciless way he had taken and held power made them smile
knowingly to themselves. And he had, too, got rid of unem
ployment. 'That's the way you want to do it,' Searle often said.
'You got to admit it.'
They did not care that the policy of the East End Fascists
was an evil one. It was action, and it was the absence of action
which had ground despair into the bones of the young
unemployed. They had come to the conclusion that only some
kind of stirring of the pot offered them a chance of picking out
a bit of fat for themselves. They were ready for that stirring.
They moved easily into the anti-semitic camp. Searle, in
particular, lost no chance of turning every argument against
the Jews. 'Honestly, mate, don't you think we'd be hetter
without all them yids?' The Marxist arguments against the
bourgeoisie could be levelled easily, in the East End of
London, against the J ews, who owned many of the shops and
businesses. The fact that they dressed more ostentatiously
than their gentile trade rivals made them appear to be doing
well even when they weren't. They clung together in a free
masonry offamily groups, and worked at their private businesses
all the hours they spent out of sleep. No wonder they thrived !
These circumstances created in the East End a visible, and
far from modest, commercial community which to the unem
ployed embodied the vices of the bourgeois about which they
had learnt all that socialist propaganda could teach them.
I do not know when it was that the Mosley crowd discovered
that the East End was ripe for anti-semitism, but from the
moment Mosley opened his campaign he began to win its
support. Had a Second World War not intervened, more than
one East End seat would have gone over to the Fascists. My
prophecies about this were unpalatable to my left-wing friends.
They talked about the unemployed as others talked about a
rise or a fall in Stock Exchange prices : they were a figure
going up or down. But they did not know them. I had come to
know them very well as bitter, hopeless and even degenerating
individuals whose unwantedness had become the very core of
their lives. I felt deep shame for the attitude of the left, which
wanted to exploit them for political reasons, even for Russian
reasons, and for the inertia of the right, which resisted the
233

R E D P O P L A R-GREY U N E M P L O Y E D

help that might have been given to them lest national works
on a grand scale interfere with profits or power.
The spokesman of the bitterness among my men was an
agitator called Green who had once been a paid street-corner
speaker for some right-wing body (a fact Green's comrades
never allowed him to forget) . But he alone stood up until the
bitter end for the Socialist Revolution. He was an evil-looking
customer who seemed compounded all of hate and vindictive
ness. His cheeks pouched and sagged round a cruel, unshaven
mouth. He had bulbous, angry eyes with huge perpetually
watering bags beneath them. Yet he was tall and heavy, and in
his prime must have been a confident and commanding
man. His comrades were desperately afraid of his mordant
tongue. He would sit wearing a cap and when he got up to
speak hurriedly take it off and roll it in his palms.
'What does capitalism care about you? You're only so much
cattle, or fodder for the guns, only you don't have the sense to
realize it. And if you don't do what you're told, why, what
d'you think they've got police and soldiers for? Why?' And
here he brought his great beefy fist up and crashed it sound
lessly into his cap. 'Smash ! SMASH YER BRAINS IN!
Don't talk to me,' he would go on furiously, his piggy eyes
darting angrily all over the unemployed, 'don't talk to me about
justice, democracy ! Poppycock ! There ain't no difference
between it and Fascism. Fascism ! FORCE ! That's what it all is.
Don't kid yourselves. They don't care a brass farden about
you or democracy, no matter what Mr. Paul says. He's only
paid to come ' ere to talk to you. You're only of use while they
can make profit out of you. Marx told you that. But once they
can't? What then? Look at me l ' He would open his arms to
demonstrate his rags and uselessness, like a ragged old crow
about to take off, and shout, 'Look at all of you ! SCRAP !
SCRAPHEAP! THROW YOU AWAY LIKE A LEAKY
KETTLE ! BAH ! YOU MAKE ME SICK!' And then he
would sit down, pull his cap on, and continue to rumble
indignantly while his comrades growled approval.
In those years I warned the Poplar unemployed of the
approaching war, and told them not to rely upon Russia.
Russia would pursue her national interests regardless of the
West, I said, and in any case her own purges and persecutions
told us that her morality was no hetter than Hitler's. Green
2 34

RED P O P LAR-GREY UNEMP L OYED

could not bear any criticism of Russia. The one force in a

rotten world on which he still pinned hope was the Soviet
Union : easier to deprive him of life itself than of that fantastic,
stupendous expectation of miracles from the Soviet, which
grew the more unassailable the more despairing he became,
and the more pitiable the state of the world. So he would never
permit me to criticize the Soviet Union, or to suggest that any
war was possible between Germany and the West.
'Don't talk to me,' he'd shout. 'Capitalists will never again
make war upon capitalists. They're as thick as thieves. Capit
alism's international, and the war-scares are cooked up to
make you put up with what you haven't got. Capitalism's
not going to war: don't kid yourself. It knows too well that
war gives the workers a chance to down 'em and rise up and
establish a classless society. It's all my eye, this war-talk.
While you're thinking of war you can't be thinking of other
things near home-poverty, that's the real thing. And why
fight against Fascism? What difference d'you think it'd make
if it did come? Not an atom to you. You wouldn't be any
worse off-YOU COULDN'T BE. BECAUSE WHAT'S
THIS GOVERNMENT? WHY, FASCIST !'
He could not endure the truth about the developments of
1 939 and 1 940. The agreement between Germany and Russia
and the war against Finland shocked the very soul of the man.
He did his best to swallow the Communist Party line, and
would say, 'You'll see, Mr. Paul, at the right moment they'll
turn their guns together, Britain and Germany, on Russia.
That's the game. Youjust see. This is all eyewash, this war.'
But as my criticisms of Russian policy grew more scathing,
and, as once I had shared Green's illusions, more bitter,
Green felt that the break had come. He burst out one day into
a wild defence of Russia through which his stark despair
showed all too plainly, and ended by saying, ' I've taken a lot
from you, Mr. Paul, and I ain't going to take any more. That's
flat. So I'll bid you goodday.' And he smoothed his few hairs
and pulled his cap on and marched out of the hall to the
ironical cheers of the delighted men, who loved a row. It was
the last I saw of him. He was evacuated when the bombing
started, and then came back, and yet once more went away
when his house was blown to pieces around him.
I continued my work with the Poplar unemployed until a
2 35

RED P O P LA R-GREY UNEMP LOYED

week or two before my call-up in 1 94 1 . By then the meeting

was a shadow of its former self: the young had been called-up,
the middle-aged were in jobs, many of the elderly had been
evacuated. The hall in which we met had been partially
blitzed and we adjourned to a small vestry. It was large
enough to take us for we were now hardly a dozen strong. To
one of these meetings the irrepressible Charlie Whistler came,
whiter and more cadaverous than ever, delighted to take the
chair again for me. He was bubbling over with such happiness
that I had to ask him the cause of it. He turned to me with
shining eyes. 'Why,' he said. 'I ain't scared. I bin worrying
myself sick about what I would do if a bomb hit our houses'.
I was scared I'd go mad, and more scared o' that than the
bombing. And last night we 'ad it. Whooosh ! We 'ad it. I bin
sleepin' downstairs to keep an old man company and had to
get him out of the house. And what with that, and 'elpin' to
pull people out, and making cups o' tea, I didn't remember
I was supposed to be scared. There now, what d'you think of
that?' He wrinkled his old face into fantastic glee and I was the
only one of the pair of us to remember that, three days before,
neighbours had put a brick through his window because he
would go around saying what a criminal thing war was.
"Eard about old Greeny?' he asked me.
'No.'
'Gorn blind, the poor old sod.'
Some of the others chipped in while I sat thinking of him,
remembering his popping, threaded, bloodshot eyes.
'Yers. Carrying a white stick now. Course, you won't see
'im. He's at llkley. The doctor said the shock of them bombs
had busted something be'ind the eye. There ain't no 'ope.'
We sat sorrowfully thinking of him, of his continual anger
against the world. Another said sadly, "Taint so good without
'im. He was always one for an argument. Lor, wasn't 'e. He
would always work up a good discussion for you, Mr. Paul.'
They said things like that to excuse themselves and placate
me. They were old and tired and exhausted by life before ever
the war began, and they continued to come together for
company, and because they liked me. For seven years we had
been discussing the dash of the nations and the hatreds of the
classes, and now all the furies which came from these things
had broken loose and were raging through the world. We
236

R E D P O P LAR

GREY UNEMPLOYED

could not even imagine what they were going to leave

undestroyed, let alone discuss how they might be chained up
again. Discussion seemed paltry and futile in terms of the battle
of demons taking place round the humble Poplar houses night
and day, and creating bonfires not to be put out by a kick from
bicycling police. Yet they felt this only, and were quite in
capable of saying much more than 'It don't seem much use
talkin', do it?' They had a fixed nation I was most unhappy
without 'a good discussion' and might decide to abandon them
if I did not get it. It was with difficulty that I told them my
call-up had come and I would soon be leaving them.

2 37

CHAPTER F O U RTEEN

F es tival and Terror

ow hard it is now to recall the overwhelming sense of

H defeat felt, from the year I 934 onwards, by all those on the

left who had any independence of mind or character. Twenty

years had passed since the beginning of the Great War, and
during all that long period of unrest and upheaval the things
for which the left stood-peace, economic planning, the
classless society, world government-became more impossible
of achievement. At home, the Labour Movement had not
recovered from the betrayal and defeat of I 93 I . Abroad
Germany, Italy and Spain were precursors of a new and more
violent nationalism, and even more than Germany, the Soviet
Union itself presently became the graveyard of socialism,
drenching itself in the blood of its own heroes. It was against
this background that many of us tried to move to a more
profound reading of contemporary history.
One effect the situation had on me was to send me into the
ranks of that exciting venture which owed its foundation to the
genius of H. G. Wells and C. E. M. Joad-the Federation of
Progressive Societies and Individuals, which began its work in
I 934 H. G. Wells was asking in those days for a common
front of left parties and intellectuals throughout the world.
It was to be different from the Popular Front, which owed its
existence to the sinister conspiratorial talent of the Communist
Party. I was only a cynical supporter of the Popular Front
because I did not bdieve that the Communist Party could
co-operate genuinely with anybody, and knew that at any
moment a switch of Kremlin policy would bring the whole
structure down in ruins. The intention of the Popular Front
238

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

programme was co-operation with Catholics, Liberals and

even Conservatives if they could be manuvred into an
anti-Fascist bloc. Of necessity it meant dropping a 'left'
programme. But Wells sensibly wanted the agreement of all
those who were united on a left programme. 'The aim to
make the world anew and nearer the heart's desire of mankind
is universal,' he wrote, * 'but the methods are generally
local, sectarian, partisan, hysterical, and confused. The forces
of protest and reconstruction are in the aggregate enormous,
but they go largely to waste in a sort of civil war among
themselves.'
This led him to write one of those manifestoes for which
he had become famous. He called it 'The Common Objectives
of Progressive World Effort,' and it began with nothing less
than the omnibus demand for 'the scientific development of
the actual and potential resources of the world and the dis
tribution of the resulting wealth to provide the fullest and
most vigorous life possible for the whole species'. Capitalism,
despite its raging exploitation of the resources of the world, had
clearly not gone far enough for him, and this imaginative,
warmhearted but confused giaflt went on to ask for collective
instead of private enterprise, a world system of money and
credit, the organization of world government and the 'Progress
ive abrogation of national sovereignty', the modernization of
education, and free speech, free publication and free movement
throughout the world. In fact, his manifesto made almost
exactly the same demands of a radical and liberal nature
which were made in the Kibbo Kift Covenant fifteen years
earlier and were echoed again in the Charter and Programme
which I had drawn up for the Woodcraft Folk, and both of
these documents owed j ust as much to the genius of H. G. Wells
as the new Manifesto. It says much for his moral and intellectual
stature that, in those years, he had become the spokesman and
thinker of almost the entire non-Marxist left, and perhaps
nothing is more revealing to-day than the subseque!lt collapse
of H. G. Wells into a pessimism, or rather into a grief as deep
as that ofjob's. The tide of the book published before his death
Mind at the End of its Tether confessed his switch into
despair:

Manifesto: The Book of the Federation ofProgressive Societies, Edited by C. E. M.Joad.

1934

2 39

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

'A frightful queerness has come into life. Hitherto events

have been held together by a certain logical consistency as the
heavenly bodies have been held together by the golden cord of
gravitation. Now it is as if the cord had vanished and every
thing is driven anyhow, anywhere at a steadily increasing
velocity . . . The writer is convinced that there is no way out,
or around, or through the impasse. It is the end. '
Nevertheless in 1 934 H. G . Wells was still wearing before
us a golden optimism about human possibilities, and he hoped
much from his new effort. His Manifesto was followed by a
'Strategy' which involved a union of left forces. This it was
left for Dr. Joad and his associates to work out; they sought to
do so by founding the Federation mentioned, which in its turn
published a solemn Manifesta demanding, in brief, regional
and world planning, the reorganization of world finance, the
setting up of world government, a universal and modernized
system of education, law reform, town and country planning,
civil and religious liberties and, in sex, 'the release of personal
conduct from all taboos and restrictions except those imposed
in the interest of the weak and the young'. It was the last
point which gained, I always thought, the greatest number of
recruits, for intellectual interest was in those days most power
fully oriented towards 'the sex problem' -partly as a reaction,
I suppose, to the insolubility of economics.
The Woodcraft Folk adhered to the new 'strategy' and
appointed me its representative. I became editor of a monthly
review called Plan founded to propagate the views of the new
Federation. Plan command ed a distinguished list of progressive
contributors-H. G. Wells, C. E. M. Joad, Gerald Heard,
Aldous and Julian Huxley, J. C. Flugel, Bertrand Russell,
Dora Russell, A. S. Neill, John MacMurray, Janet Chance,
Olaf Stapledon and others-and through them sought to
create a common left forum : it also found space for the intro
duction of new writers and young poets-Savage, Treece,
Mallalieu and others-some of whom were first published in its
pages.
I found myself more interested in the new Federation than
in my own youth movement (of which, in any case, I was no
longer the active leader) : the intellectual curiosities of the Folk
were slender. Fast-fixed by now in a few tabloid beliefs, it
pushed even discussion of these out of the way as quickly as
240

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

possible in order to make haste with the real business of youth,

camping, hiking, singing and living the life of brotherhood and
physical delight. How could I blame them, who had preached
this life to the young? Yet it was a relief to turn to the
conferences and summer schools of the F.P.S. I. where one
found a level of serious debate it was difficult to find elsewhere
at that time, and to which the yellowing pages of the old files of
Plan bear witness. This capacity for argument transferred itself
to the committees of the F.P.S.I., alas, which proved capable
of arguing everything exhaustively, and of doing nothing
resolutely. The dream of a new force uniting left-wing move
ments perished of the paralysis produced by endless debate
about principles. Left intellectuals did not, I soon discovered,
know how to act.
As the years went by I came seriously to doubt the whole
basis of the new Federation. It had, in actual practice, only
two driving principles, the first was the wish to have sexual
freedom, as a matter of personal pleasure and of mental therapy,
for following the analyses made by Freud and his disciples it
attributed much spiritual sickness to sexual inhibition; the
second was a generalized demand for world socialism (planning,
collective ownership, world government) . It did not appear to
dawn on the Federation that it was asking for a morality in
economics which it condemned in the sharpest terms in sex. In
economics it repeated constantly its belief that the unregulated
play of economic appetites was disastrous : they had to be
curbed in the interests of society as a whole : the laissez:faire
society led to slums, unemployment and dass warfare. It
made the same case against unregulated personal behaviour in
relation to town and country planning, and the argument was
that man's behaviour with his own property was not socially
reliable. Society must step in and tell him what to do, or take
certain rights from him. But in the field of sex this interference
was regarded as intolerable. So the Federation which asked for
the state control of industry agitated for the repeal of the
Abortion Laws. In the matter of sex it demanded an indiv
idual freedom the exact counterpart of that Benthamism
which in the sphere of economics had led to such shocking
social consequences. And no one seemed conscious of the
conflict of principle involved. I began to think that it wa
altogether illogical to ask that economic enterprises should be
Q.

24 1

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

subject to moral laws and sex released 'from all taboos and
restrictions', and these reservations made it in the end inevitable
that I should withdraw. However, the coming of the Second
World War rather extinguished the whole enterprise, its love
of a brave new world side by side with its rather crotchety
pacifism.*
Marxism was the discipline to which I found myself com
pelled to return. It still seemed to me coherent, complete and
revolutionary: but at the same time I had no love for it as an
orthodoxy. Marxism, I argued, could not have it both ways, it
could not be an orthodoxy and a science. The contemporary
situation showed how terribly necessary it was for Marxism to
pursue the truth about itself as relentlessly as it daimed to
pursue the truth about capitalist society. If it was to be no
more than an excuse for hatred and violence then it, too,
would have to be abandoned. My young brother was growing
up in those days, an earnest young student, and we had much
in common, and around us gathered a group ofyoung socialists,
trotskyists, poets and students, and their girls, who began to
form with me what was almost a new school of Marxism.
Our week-end discussions brought us face to face with an
historical problem which criticism had overlooked and Marxist
orthodoxy denied : it concerned the profound difference
between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Marxist
orthodoxy went on repeating the old formula of inevitability,
that one dass lined itself up behind the others in the struggle for
power: history was a knock-out competition. The ruling dass
sought to exploit and keep in check the oppressed dass, which
struggled to attain power itself by the revolutionary overthrow
of existing society. The orthodox pointed to the French
revolution as the dassic example of the bourgeois revolution,
and to the Russian revolution as the prototype of proletarian
revolutions. The Russian proletariat was simply doing in I g 1 7
what the French bourgeoisie had done before: the pattern of
history was therefore unchanging.
Yet it turned out to be impossible to compare the proletariat
and the bourgeois as dasses. The unique thing about the
bourgeoisie was that a bourgeois sociery came into existence
long befare the bourgeois revolution took place, a society so strong, (as
in England,) as often to make a revolution unnecessary. To
*It survives as The Progressive League.

FE STIV A L A N D T E R R O R

talk of the bourgeois as a dass oppressed and exploited by the

feudal aristocracy was, once that bourgeois society had really
come into existence, flagrantly untrue. Even in medieval days,
though merchants were sometimes pillaged, they were not
exploited in the sense in which Marxism defines exploitation.
Rather, the merchant dass was to be discovered as a 'sport' of
feudalism, a swarm which had hived off from the main comm
unity based on land. The economy of this swarm became based
on money, by which it simply escaped feudalism which could
only tax it and control it, in the degree that it, itself, surrendered
to the new monetary economy. The only dass exploited in a
Marxist sense by the feudal aristocracy was the peasantry: the
feudal aristocracy lived off its labour. And this was the one
dass which did not succeed in its revolution, though in historie
logic it was the oppressed dass which should have overthrown
its masters. The peasants only achieved land and freedom when
they were able to ally themselves with_ the bourgeoisie.
Century after century this merchant dass grew stronger.
Religion, art and literature bowed before it. Under puritan
influence in protestant countries hardworking and thrifty
dasses of merchants and manufacturers arose, builders of their
own. conventides, founders of schools, owners of newspapers.
A well-knit, confident society with an ethic and philosophy of
its own came into being which at last, and even reluctantly,
challenged the feudal aristocracy's monopoly of political
power. The bourgeois revolution was the political struggle
between two mature and well-organized dasses economically
independent of each other.
The proletarian dass presented no such parallel : it was
much more like the peasantry under feudalism, a genuinely
exploited dass with few instruments of production of its
own, and saturated with the values and standards of the dass
it sought to overthrow. No vast, self-sufficient proletarian
society, we argued, supports the proletarian revolution. On
the contrary the proletariat is as inescapably a part of the
bourgeois order as the peasantry was of the feudal order.
Left alone the proletariat expresses its preferences for the
bourgeois life in no uncertain fashion-professional football,
dog-racing, organized by wealthy corporations, are its first
choice in amusements: it prefers the cinema to the live theatre
and the News of the World to Maxim Gorki. The bourgeoisie
2 43

FE STIV AL AND TERROR

first created its sociery then made its revolution : the proletariat,
on the other hand, must make its revolution befare it can
create a proletarian society. But bearing in mind that the
exploited peasantry never succeeded in defeating the feudal
aristocracy and creating a peasant society, but on the contrary
surrendered with the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, it was
quite impossible to speak of an inevitable proletarian revolution.
It was because of the unconscious recognition of this, that revolts
against the bourgeois order took on the nihilism-the wish to
destroy all society-which is to be found in peasant revolts too.
I said that it was important to remember too that if a contem
porary revolution did succeed then what would come to
power would be another kind of bourgeoisie, not therefore
another class. Point was given to this by the fact that the
leaders of the Communists were nearly everywhere dissatisfied
bourgeois intellectuals.
A second possibility we discussed was the coming
disappearance of the proletariat. Statistics showed a decrease
in the number of workers in basic industries and a rise of those
employed in secondary industries and services. A middle
dass-of technicians, managers, experts, derks, civil servants,
teachers and others-was growing, while increasing mechan
ization destroyed the skilled craftsman as well as the unskilled
labourer. We were impressed, in those days, by the rise of
'technocrats,' the people whom to-day, under the influence of
Burnham's writings, we should describe as 'the managerial
dass.'
All these heretical arguments directed at the heart of
Marxism were gradually tearing it to shreds. The process of
darification so showed up its fallacies and contradictions that
it was inevitable that the group and I should abandon it. At
the time, however, that was far from my intention. The young
German Social Democrats who had not been compromised by
the failure of their elder!y leaders had come together in secret
conclave and drafted a new programme-Neu Beginnen (New
Beginning) . I had read the English translation with passionate
interest, for here at last was the thinking without illusions
which the situation demanded. Social-Democratic and
Communist orthodoxies were alike condemned : the socialist
society was not inevitable, it was simply one of many choices
apen to humanity . From France too, especially in the writings
244

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

of the Marxist-Leninist Simone Weil, whose evolution from

Marxism to Christianity was to be much the same as my own,
were coming criticisms of the left ideologies just as pungent and
stimulating. It was Neu Beginnen however which sent me across
Europe to Prague in 1 93 8 in the hope that I might meet some
of its leaders in secret, and talk with them about their neo
Marxist analysis of contemporary history. I was going on to
Vienna, too, to renew old contacts there. My aim was to
establish in England study groups prepared to undertake
missions of aid to the socialist underground in Germany and
Austria. My many classes, all over London, on social questions
had brought me in touch with scores of young socialists
anxious to do this work, and hungry for contact with the men
oftheir own stamp whom Hitler had driven underground.
Despite all that I had read I was unprepared for the Germany
I saw as my train slid into Aachen Station. Uniforms were
four or five deep on the platform-the Black of the SS, the
Brown of the Stormtroopers, the Green of the Fron tier Police,
the Blue of the Airforce-Aachen under the floodlights of the
midday sun looked like the stage of the Lyceum during the
transformation scene of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The
civilians in barely tolerated little groups, appeared miserably
conscious of their insignificance in the midst of the warrior
array. What I had supposed to be merely the frontier display,
however, turned out to be typical of the Third Reich : uniforms
were everywhere, as though the whole nation had turned out
for a tattoo. Not that the old, dean Germany of so many
memories had gone: as the train slid into German towns and
villages in the early mornings, the pure loveliness I dearly
remembered from earlier years was unchanged. The dry,
sparkling June air laved my head as I le ant out of the carriage
window. The tall, cream and fawn houses with their medieval
gabled roofs rose out of the quiet, swept streets along which
already the yawning little boys with brown bare legs, wearing
satchels like military rucsacs, hopped with naked arched feet
from stone to stone, and their little sisters with flaxen pigtails,
in crisp blue and white dirndls walked soberly behind them,
hand in hand, to school. The reflected light of the pale walls
beat about them and made lemon the caves of shadow in the
street, and lit the hollows under the eaves where the starlings
and sparrows nested. The same hausfraus were about early
2 45

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

with their shopping baskets, and they had !eft pillows and
bolsters in the open windows to air. Still to be seen in market
towns were the storks nesting among the chimney pots and the
kestrels wheeling round the church towers. So that all, in the
transfiguring morning, had the quality of the fairy tales of
infancy: for in our infant story books, these were the houses, the
storks, the women with shopping bags, and the flaxen haired
girls and merry boys that the artists had long ago shown
to us. The heart-catching innocence of this beauty was even
symbolic, for lying in wait for the golden-hearted children of
Hans Andersen and Grimm were the dragons of the plains, the
uncles who pretended affection the better to destroy them, or
the fairies who bewitched them with spells till they acted
contrary to their natures.
'A nation on the march' had always seemed a strained
metaphor: now it appeared literally true. Everywhere I met
the marching, singing bands-the files of 'pimpfjugend' with
sweating brows and loaded rucsacs resolutely plodding forest
paths, the youth of the arbeitsdienst, naked to the waist, with
spades polished like bayonets, marching to songs which
once meant much to me for I had translated them for English
youth, young conscripts in rough, ill-fitting uniforms, and the
black of the SS, men more satanically proud of their evil than
any soldiery can ever have been before. It had a perverse
glory, this will to war against the whole world. Was Germany
really defeated in the Great War? When I remembered the
degenerating Poplar unemployed it made me wonder. One
admired reluctantly, though frightened of all it implied, the
animal health and vigour with which this spiritual callousness
was clothed, the magnificent sunburnt bodies, the shining eyes,
and, behind thin red lips, the stallion teeth ready to tear and
bite as Hitler's generation steamed and stamped about the
country.
The prickly, adolescent resentment against the world was
hard to bear. In the dining car the man opposite me, somewhat
older than I was, wearing in his buttonhole the badge of a
party official, leant rudely across to me and slapped his fist on
the book I was reading. It was a Gollancz publication and bore
the title Tales of Horror and Imagination.
'You read plenty of tales of horror about Germany in your
English newspapers,' he said angrily. 'Is that not so?'
2 46

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

I replied coldly that unfortunately it was so. He subjected

me to a hostile scrutiny for a moment, studying the configur
ation of my ears lest they should turn out to beJewish.
'Everyone ofthem lies,' he said emphatically. 'Lies ! Lies ! '
I said I was glad to hear it, and hoped indeed that they
were lies.
'Look at Germany,' he said angrily, screwing up his eyes
at the sun-drenched countryside through which we were
passing so swiftly and smoothly. 'Is it not a good land? You
can see for yourself how untrue all the English tales of horror
are.'
Indeed, the Germany of that June day possessed a beauty
which made the heart ache. 'It's a pity such a lovely land has
to feel the world is against her,' I replied in a conciliatory tone.
'But we do not feel the world against us, only the Jews.
England and Germany would get along very well if you were
not run by J ews. '
'Oh but w e aren't,' I said, caught out b y this pathological
switch.
He smiled a secret smile which pitied me for allowing
myself to be deceived. 'Simon is a Jew.'
'Scotch !'
'A Jewish name,' he replied, thumping the table with his
fist. 'Rothermere-plainly Jewish. Beaverbrook too: and
Chamberlain-Joseph and Austen Chamberlain-one can tell
from their photographs. Hore Belisha-all, all,Jews.'
'Well, why shouldn't they be? They aren't, but why should
it matter?'
He looked round with a start j ust in case anyone had heard
my heresy which, though perhaps explicable in a foreigner,
was not such as he cared to be heard listening to. He raised his
voice so that his denials might be heard and began the tirades
with which Der Stuermer and the rest of the pathological
literature of Germany were soon to make me sickeningly
familiar, and I was glad when the opportunity came to escape
to the privacy of my sleeper.
This was only one of many incidents. Outside a cinema in
Dresden when I asked a youth for a light for my cigarette he
turned angrily with fist raised to strike me because I had
omitted the customary 'Heil Hitler !' and desisted only when
he saw that I was a foreigner. I did not get my light.
24 7

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

It was a relief to get to Prague which, though troubled

deeply by the German menace, to which it had already once
replied with mobilization, was at least free from hysteria and
xenophobia. I had come first of all to visit the Sokol Congress
at the Masaryk Stadium which stands above Prague. It was a
spectacle which showed a discipline and resolution hardly to be
matched even in a totalitarian country. The Sokol movement
Sokol means Falcon-had an ancient and honourable history.
Founded in 1 862 by two Bohemian patriots, Tyrs and Fugner,
it was intended to renew Czech patriotism among the young by
filling them with the comradely life of sport and gymnastics :
it had in some strange way got mixed up with Garibaldi's
redshirts and this accounted for a uniform of ltalian cut-red
shirts, ( they had bought a job lot from Garibaldi) , khaki knee
breeches, pillbox hats, and jackets with elaborate facings.
During Austro-Hungarian domination the Sokol movement
had kept patriotism alive: since independence it had played
the role of a national Boy Scout Movement-idealistic, to some
extent pre-military in character, and intensely patriotic. And
now that Czechoslovakia was threatened, the Sokol Congress,
planned for purely internal propaganda, was converted into
an act of defiance of Germany so unmistakable that the N azis
organized a rival show just across the frontier and nightly
filled the radio air with the barbaric incantation 'Sieg Heil !
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil !' to the rhythm of an African tomtom.
National though the Sokol demonstration was, it was
hardly militarist. Even the speeches of Benes lacked a Church
illian growl. Day after day the arena was the scene of the
beautiful evolutions of countless thousands of Sokol members.
The stadium was vast enough to hold as many as 30,000
drilling gymnasts. To watch, from the eminence of the press
box, this vast concourse march on to the plain was like witness
ing the unrolling of an immense sheet of cloth. It wound from
beneath the flag-surmounted wall of the gladiators' entrance
like a sheet emerging firm and crisply ironed from the rollers
of a mangle, and so far distant that one could not make out the
person of a single gymnast in the onflooding wave. The
uniformity of the drill was ensured by the music of massed
hands, but these played in a soundproof chamber and commun
icated their marches only through loudspeakers let like manhole
covers into the floor of the parade ground. The effects were
248

FEST! V AL AND TERROR

memorable. When an arena full of girls in white singlets and

navy blue bloomers touched their toes, the field which had been
as white as a newly minted table-cloth became a landscape of
drab, and a faint sigh came up to us. When sixty thousand
sunburnt arms were fiung to the sky then we saw and heard a
field of corn in the wind. The performers bent to pick first a
white ball, then a red ball. They tossed them alternately. As
the balls rose and fell, the field was white, then red, and the
fiickering change reproduced to the eye that throb which the
chequered wings of peewits will give to the whole sky. When
the girls turned in ranks to each other and threw catches the
travelling arcs of red and white became that pure form and
motion after which the most abstract painters strive. Day after
day the patriotic masses displayed before us, and when the boys,
with naked brown torsoes and white shorts leapt in leapfrogging
lines across the arena what one witnessed was the surge and
white foaming, and the dull swish and roar, of the incoming
tide. Ah, that all life could have this rhythm !
The last day was reserved for the military display and new
fighters and bombers roared overhead. Across the field, army
units gave the kind of display that the British Army does so
very much hetter. When, in the march past, Yugoslav and
Rumanian troops appeared, they were welcomed with a
tremendous roar. Of course, they came from countries of the
Little Entente and so were allies of Czechoslovakia, and on
paper, but only on paper, might be counted on for help in the
coming struggle for independence. The sad thing historically
was that this Sokol unity was not itself enough to save the
country, and we all knew it, even then. Or perhaps the really
tragical thing was that the Czechs did not elect to put it to the
test of events, as they might well have done, but rested their
fate upon the word of the Great Powers. European history
might have been far different had the Czechs determined
instinctively on the kind of resistance which would have been
spontaneous in Dutch or Swiss, no matter what the consequences.
Heaven knows, I do not for one moment excuse the great
betrayal of Munich, but the Czechs were lost the moment it
began to appear that under pressure they would cede territory.
Prague was still to remain for a month or two the home of
the emigre Social-Democratic groups of Germany. It was
through meetings with them that I managed to arrange a talk
2 49

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

with one of the Neu Beginnen leaders. He had refused to meet

me in Germany, lest I was the instrument of a trap. And even
in Prague I was not allowed to know his name, and so spoke to
him only as Hans. We came together in secret in a ruined
mill just outside the town, in what was an E. Phillips Oppen
heim atmosphere. The useless water from the sluice below
rushed noisily away, causing the whole building to tremble.
The dust of years made as soft and silent as velvet the floor
under our feet, and the cobwebs wavered in veils from the roof.
My friend and sponsor stayed discreetly at the door while
Hans and I retired to a corner for our discussion on those
neo-Marxist theses I have already presented. Hans was stocky,
with broad strong hands, and faintly ginger hair. He wore
green tweeds which had an English look. He had a furtive way
of glancing quickly about him as he spoke and dropping his
voice so that I could hardly hear him. 'It isn't necessary to do
that, comrade,' I pointed out. 'No one can overhear us.'
He apologized and said that it was a way one got into in
Germany, and I would soon learn that when I left Czecho
slovakia to stay in the Third Reich. However, my proposal to
organize collaborating groups of young English did not go
down very well. What he thought ofwere purely material needs
like English passports, pounds sterling, and secret printing
presses which I knew were out of the question to small groups
of not very well-off English youth: nor could I imagine that
these things would be forthcoming for an organization in
Germany of which absolutely nothing was known. My concep
tion of couriers going into Germany, and coming out again, in
order to create a personal linkage and personal service was not
approved : from the point of view of Neu Beginnen it was
considered too risky. Said Hans, foreigners have to register and
are watched. The Germans they visit become the objects of
police surveillance. It would not work. But I came away with
the feeling that even if it had been practicable, he himself
would not have been in a position to help it forward. Beyond
his immediate companions he knew little or nothing of the
underground work of other socialist groups and, what was
more, was sceptical of its extent. This was disheartening, but
nevertheless tended to confirm my secret suspicion of the
extent to which German socialists and communists had
accepted Nazism, faute de mieux, and were in sympathy with
250

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

its ambition to destroy the 'Versailles Diktat,' or at least had

retreated into a watchful neutrality until such time as they
might return openly to their first love.
The atmosphere of European terror closed in on me in
Vienna where I stayed in the tiny flat, in a Grinzing gemeinde
hof, of my old friends Anton and Reserl Tesarek. Under
Anton's discreet and skilful hands an illegal socialist group of
sorts had come to life. The Vienna socialists had gone through
two bitter tests denied to their pusillanimous colleagues over
the border. They had once, when attacked by Dollfuss, resorted
to arms. It was true that the defiance was 'too late and too
little', and had it been earlier it might even have succeeded.
Yet it was a remarkable act of audacity all the same: with
moving heroism the members of the Vienna Fire Brigade and
the Republican Schutzbund had defended working dass
tenements against the field guns of the regular Austrian Army.
That lost battle had bound the survivors in never-to-be
forgotten ties ofblood and sacrifice. I was proudly shown, under
oath of secrecy, the hiding places of the small arms used in that
rebellion, which the socialists were holding against the day
when they could settle accounts with Hitler. The second
experience was of continued illegal activity. From 1 934 until
Hitler conquered Austria the Social-Democratic Party had
remained the invisible yet acknowledged opposition. The
Fatherland Front had quite failed to break it, as it had failed
to destroy the National Socialists. This had given rise to an
acid little story which described four men marching down the
street in the uniform of the Fatherland Front. At the end of the
street two turned left and two turned right. The two who turned
right whispered to each other, 'Heil Hitler! It's a good job
those other chaps don't know that we're Nazis.' The two
who turned left gave each other a nudge and said 'Freund
schaft ! Those blighters would give a lot to know that we're Sozis.'
Schuschnigg had to reckon with the fact that the allegiance
of the Viennese to the party of that redoubtable European
humanist, the late Karl Renner, was unshaken. At the very end,
the opposition Schuschnigg had declared illegal swarmed to the
streets ready to join hands with him in armed resistance
to the Nazis. Perhaps if he had not been surrounded by
Cabinet traitors he would have been prepared for that alliance,
for he was an honourable man. But it was all too late, and the
251

F ESTIVA l.. AND TERROR

Austrian socialists disappeared underground again as quickly

as they had risen. So it happened that during the years of
illegality the Socialists learnt how to keep going small
underground groups and to circulate forbidden propaganda.
Their morale was . high. The circulation of the flimsy Arbeiter
Zeitung far exceeded that of the legal journals. It is true, how
ever, that the Schuschnigg terror was not a very formidable
one. It had its Ruritanian aspects. One evening Anton was due
to take part, in a neighbour's flat, in a 'kaffee-abend' of
socialists. He was late, and when he arrived the police were
already there taking away his friends in plain vans. This filled
him with the not surprising fear that, having failed to arrive,
he might be suspected of having been the informer, and so
intolerable was this that he exclaimed, in his agitation, to the
policeman at the door, 'Look here, you must arrest me too.
Ich bin auch ein' illegal Sozi. In fact I should have been at this
meeting only I unluckily missed my tram.' The policeman
gravely saluted and said, 'Go away, Herr Professor, please
can't you see that we're busy?' Raving failed in his objective,
Anton marched angrily to the police station and bearded the
distrait lnspector. 'Look here, lnspector, I know you've taken
all the people out of Schmidt's flat. You've got to arrest me,
too. I should have been there anyway, and what will people
think of me if l'm the only one not to go to j ail?' The lnspector
threw his hands and his papers in the air in a fine official fury.
'Get out, my dear sir, d'you think I haven't enough on my
hands without putting every pedagogue behind bars who comes
and asks me?'
But that sort of thing, in the spirit of Viennese light opera,
was no longer possible under the N azis. They were not running
in old socialists just then, for they hoped to win them over to
the support of the new regime, but they knew them, had them
watched, and brought professional and other subtle pressures
to bear on them. lndeed, they knew more than we suspected.
My journeyings were known and viewed with disfavour, it
seems. Hans of Neu Beginnen was certainly right when he told
me that citizens of the Third Reich who had foreign friends
were liable to rouse the attentions of the Gestapo, for when
Anton was arrested as 'unreliable' at the outbreak of the war,
and beaten up by the Gestapo, a large part of the inquisition
to which he was subject concerned the activities of one 'Leslie
252

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

Paul' and Anton's connections with him. Anton had the perfect
answer, for he was my official translator and my novel Periwake
was contracted to be published by Vienna Saturn- Verlag, on
September 3rd, 1 939 ! Nevertheless, this did not save him tiom
the Buchenwald death quarries. All this, however, was in the
future : in the year of Munich, Anton and his friends hopefully
persevered with their underground work of which the main
purpose j ust then was to keep contact, and to spread informa
tion to counter the lying propaganda of the Nazis. We met in
casual little groups in the Wienerwald where, spreading our
selves in the sun, with the pinetrees in blue masses on the hill
sides behind us, we talked of the politics of the world : or we
took bus into Nieder-Osterreich to meet and discuss the new
regime with old socialist leaders who had 'gone into retire
ment in the country'. We met in heuriger gardens and argued
with the grasshopper noise of zithers to protect us. There was
a bookseller, several teachers, a student or two, a joiner, and a
member of the Fire Brigade, Joschi Holaubek, ane of those
who had helped to wash the revolting Nazis out of the radio
station with his fire hoses. What we planned to do was that
which appeared impossible to organize with the Neu Beginnen
people in Germany-to send out English couriers from time
to time. We would choose informed men, who would bring
in an inconspicuous amount of literature, and would be able to
talk intelligently of what was happening in the larger world.
Each courier, at the same time, could bring out of Austria such
documents and evidence as would help to keep people abroad
posted on the internal policies of the Nazis and the underground.
I was the first of these couriers, and took back with me the
passports of several members on the run who were about to
slip into Switzerland, and the personal possessions of some
threatened J ews. I was als o the last because the expectation of
war, a few months later, made all such ventures suddenly
appear useless.
The talk everywhere was, on the eve of Munich, what was
Britain going to do? Did Britain realize, Anton asked, the
extent of the German danger? German military power was
growing every moment : ane had only to look around. Nothing
soon would stop it from overrunning the entire continent.
Any day the Nazis would take over the Skoda works in Czecho
slovakia and inherit all her powerful armaments. 'These crazy
253

FESTIVAL AND TERROR

fanaties are out to make Germany master of the world, and if

England does not show the way to resistance we are lost in
our hearts.'
My reply was clear rather than encouraging. I said that
Britain would continue to temporize with Germany. After all,
if she could avoid a war which might drag her down for ever,
she was perhaps right, on grounds of self-preservation, to do so.
But self-preservation was bound up with the need to prevent her
neighbours from becoming too powerful, and the historie
Balance of Power policy always operated in the end to range
Britain against the would-be conqueror of the continent.
Therefore in the long run Britain was bound to resi11t : if Nazi
Germany imagined that she could buy off, or ward off, British
intervention for ever, then she was as mistaken as the Kaiser
had been. I also said that, at the moment, British pacifism
went deep. The last war had left too many scars. Most people
thought that Germany would do everything short of a major
war-she could not be so crazy as to embark on a European
war which would probably bring down all the regimes which
began it. Therefore Britain would not thrust Germany into
the situation in which Germany had to go to war, but would
be conciliatory. However, I said, Hitler is certain to take that
as a sign of weakness. If war does come, nothing, I said, will
keep Russia and America out of it. When I made this analysis
I began to feel less sure that war would come, for I could not
imagine that Hitler would commit so colossal a folly as launch
ing his country into a confiict of which no one could see the
outcome. The pathological natu.re of his hyste'ria was then most
difficult to grasp.
My arguments were received with a mixture of scepticism
and impatience. It was an immediate demonstration in
favour of European freedom that was demanded of Britain. I
could not resist a final fiing. 'Don't forget,' I said, 'that the
ease with which Hitler has established power over Germany and
Austria has made many people believe that all Germans and
Austrians, no matter what their party labels, are behind him.
If you would welcome a sign from us that we will resist, we
should welcome proof that not all Germans are behind Hitler.'
It was only necessary to say something like this to plunge
my Austrian comrades into an analysis of Marxist mistakes
similar to that which Neu Beginnen had made over the frontier.
254

FE STIV AL

AND

TERROR

On July 2 5 th, 1 934, not very many months after Dollfuss

had fought it out with the Socialists, the Nazis staged a rising
against him with the connivance of members of Dollfuss' own
cabinet. It was a short and bloody affair. A group of Nazis
seized the Ravag building, in the Johannesgasse, which was
the headquarters of the Austrian broadcasting company, and
put out a message to the effect that Dollfuss had resigned and
Hitler's creature Rintelen had formed a government. From
this vantage point the Nazis were driven out befare long by
the carbines of the armed police and the hoses of the still
socialist Vienna Fire Brigade : my friend Holaubek had
wielded one. At the Chancellery, Dollfuss had just dismissed a
Cabinet meeting, and though the police, and even Major Fey,
the Commissioner-General for Security, knew that something
unusual was afoot, no alarm had been given, and no special
precautions had been taken to protect Dollfuss and his col
leagues. A few minutes befare one o'clock on that day four
lorry-loads of men in the uniforms of the Austrian Army drove
into the Chancellery yard and closed the gates behind them.
These were the Nazi conspirators the police had been warned
to expect, but had made no preparations to meet. One group
of rebels headed straight for the Chancellor's apartments. At
their head was an ex-sergeant major, Otto Planetta. They
broke into the Chancellor's room and Planetta immediately
fired two shots at Dollfuss. He was not killed. For nearly three
hours he was left lying on a divan, slowly bleeding to death
from wounds in his neck, and refused both the services of a
doctor and the last consolations of his Church. This evil
murder, following so soon upon the civil war which had van
quished Socialist Vienna, was one more stroke of that my
sterious doom which history had marked out for Austria ever
since the murder at Sarajevo, in just such a summer, twenty
years befare.
It was the Nazi custom to canonize their gangsters and
terrorists, and Planetta and his fellow-murderers were marked
out for special honours on 2 5 th July, 1 938. A procession of
Nazi storm-troop detachments and other bo dies was to follow
in the steps of the 'veterans of the 1 934 rising' along the route
they had taken in stolen uniforms and stolen lorries four years
befare. A boastful and arrogant propaganda heralded this
demonstration of the 'liberation' of Austria from the tyranny
2 55

FESTIVAL A N D TERROR

of self-government. Everywhere streamers and flags floated

and Hitler's portrait, with its unruly adolescent lock of hair,
its sullen face and anguished stare looked down upon this
Caesarian operation upon his motherland. A public holiday
had been declared, so that the citizens might line the streets.
I went to the Ringstrasse to witness this glorification of assassi
nation, but most of Vienna stayed away: a city which loved
celebrations ignored this one. Those who were present were
the pro-Nazis of the population who, with feverish eyes,
raised hands, and shrill 'Sieg Heils' welcomed the conquerors.
I watched (alone, for my friends would not come) with bitter
ness and anger: all the follies of contemporary Europe were
symbolized for me by this display. No event in European
history had less of glory in it than the rriurder of Dollfuss.
Even the Nazis, who had failed to turn out into the streets on
the radio signal, had behaved with abominable cowardice.
All who had participated in that pseudo-revolution should
have been thankful for the obscuring mercy of time: but no !
this dreadful corpse was disinterred for the citizens to cheer,
and the Nazis could not bear it that they stayed at home.
That night in their anger they began a pogrom of Vienna
J ews, those at l east who had so far escaped the lash. Gangs of
Hitler youth went round chalking and painting 'Jud' on the
doors ofJewish shops or scribbling, with appropriate drawings,
'ripe for the gallows'. Everywhere the shops hurriedly put up
their shutters and people stayed indoors. A hush descended on
the emptying streets broken only where the organized gangs
looted shops and beat up shopkeepers. I managed to photo
graph the inscriptions over some shops, and even the eviction
of a Jewish family. My companions on these excursions were
Anton Tesarek and Joschi Holaubek. Joschi, the revolutionary
lad who had fought Dollfuss in February, 1 934, had been
a joiner's apprentice, a poor boy who had educated him
self into a position of trust in the Social-Democratic Party
through the Red Falcon movement which Anton had founded.
His surprising destiny was to become Police Chief of Vienna
immediately after the Second World War. Joschi had a voice
like a bull, and no discretion, and as we walked the streets he
bellowed his contempt and hatred of the Nazis in a way that
made my hair stand on end.
My journey home took place in face of the capitulation of
256

FE STIV A L A N D TERROR

Munich. I did not know what to say to my Austrian and Czech

friends. That perhaps a year's respite had been gained seemed
a poor reply to the break-up of the last remaining democracy
in Eastern Europe. Not only Czechoslovakia seemed to be
'receding into the darkness, mournful, broken, abandoned', but
the whole of Europe appeared to be falling into decay, its
democracy no less than its courage, its socialism no less than
its Christianity. One could only remain silent and ashamed.
One last opportunity was vouchsafed me to go abroad befare
war finally began. It was in August, I 939, and I went with
nearly a thousand Woodcraft Folk to a camp in the Ardennes
above Liege. The Woodcraft Folk were then at the height of
their power and success. At Wandres, together with Red
Falcons and Socialist Scouts from all free Europe, they had
organized a camp which was a demonstration of European
youth for peace and against fascism (not yet understanding
that they could have one policy or the other, but not both
together) . The shadow of war was over everything and our
speeches and demonstrations began to sound very thin when
news came through of the agreement between Ribbentrop and
Molotov. One could no langer doubt then that Hitler had
decided upon an autumn war. It was a relief that the waiting
was soon to be over, and the dishonour done with. Yet it was
a sinister place to camp on the eve of war, for through the
Meuse gap below us, twenty-five years befare, the grey horde
had poured on their mission to ruin Europe, and came momen
tarily to a halt befare the forts of Liege. That dread event was
about to be repeated, and I caught myself listening for the guns
which would announce it.
With English children I made solemn pilgrimages to the
war cemeteries on the slopes of the ridge, to the tiny enclosures
of stone paths and grass plots, like formal Italian gardens, with
weeping willows and cypresses surrounding them and pools
where the blackbirds came to bathe and sip. With sadness and
wonder, as if their own destiny was prefigured there, the
children stared at the names of those who had fallen in the very
first days of August, I 9 I 4, lang befare they were born, and
fallen, it now seemed, in vain. They knew that it was now their
turn to be tried, like their fathers, in the furnaces ofmodern war.
One had to turn one's eyes from their tenderness and beauty
that one might not weep.
R
257

CHAPTER F I FTEEN

The Night of the Land-Mine

was at Ilfracombe when the news of the shattering blitz

London docks filtered through, and was immediately
seized with a tremendous restlessness: I wanted to go back to
see for myself what was happening. At Ilfracombe my mother
joined me, but in the care of my sister J oan whose
husband was already away in the army, and the family
arranged for them to stay there while the raids continued.
My mother was now seriously ill from sclerosis of the brain,
the saddest blow imaginable for a person of lively tongue and
intelligence. Her speech had first begun to grow confused
some years before. Mother began to perpetrate spoonerisms
which made us all laugh. It became a family joke for a while
that she had once said, 'Tell Mrs. Polish to Mellish the fioors
no, of course, I mean tell Mrs. Mollish to Pelish the fioors.'
She had laughed with us about it, and her courage and energy
hid from us for a time that these slips held another significance,
and when it did dawn upon us that it was not fatigue or nerves,
but an obstruction to communication so considerable that
gesture was preferred, then we persuaded her to have medical
advice. That was by no means an easy matter: like all of us she
was most unwilling to confess to weakness or illness. The X-ray
plates revealed the fatal desiccation which was spreading in her
brain, but had left her strong body as yet hardly deprived of
an ounce of its energy. If one looks at such plates of the skull
then the sclerosis is to be observed by the whorls and drifts of a
deposit strangely like the sand left drying by the retreating
tide. Just so was it for mother: the tide of her life was going out
and as it receded, there in that unceasingly active brain was

I on

5 8

THE NIGHT O F THE LAND-MINE

left the dusty deposit of the years, silent iy occluding what once
had been a bright room and dosing her in loneliness within it.
It was shocking to be so aware, and so impotent, and to know
in those years how careless and indifferent one had been to her
need for love and comfort, and that never in the future, no
matter what one did, could one make it up to her. Her life's
work was done when the war began : her sons grown up, even
her youngest, horn in the fiercest days of raids in I 9 I 8, already
in France in the Royal Artillery: her daughters married, and
grandchildren already about her knees. When the war came,
with the lightest of touches-poof!-all was scattered. The
family, as if waiting for this word, dispersed, the home in
Forest Hill was dosed down, and mother evacuated. She
was never to enter it again. I sat at a table in the first days
of the war and made an inventory of her belongings, and wrote
down her will, and we both knew that this was a kind of an
end and that what had seemed, despite straitened circumstances,
so firmly rooted would never be brought together again. I
moved away into a small flat and began once again the hard
struggle to build up the sources of livelihood precariously
assembled through years of effort and now rudely shattered by
the war. It took me a year to do so, and then the blitz on
London destroyed them again. But the second time it hardly
seemed to matter in the universal human disaster and, having
registered for military service, I was waiting impatiently for
my call-up to put an end to all my uncertainties.
In Ilfracombe there was a panic in September. For days
rumours assailed us of German trial landings in Cornwall,
and the hote! tea-tables were loud with the theory that Ger
many would try to seize and hold the peninsula of Devon and
Cornwall, even should other invasion plans be abandoned, in
order to dose the Atlantic to British shipping. At the dose
of one hot September day, a sea-fog began to slip over the
tors and fall like a wall of ectoplasm on the town. The fog
bell at Bull Point began to ring monotonously, and two girls
rushed in to say that they thought it was a smoke screen
and they had heard that the invasion had already begun
on Woolacombe Sands. How angry they were when I
tried to tell them that it was a sea fog. For days these pretty
little things, who played tennis so delightfully together, would
not even speak to m e .
259

T H E N I G H T OF THE LAND-MINE

The journey home through the fair western counties made

nonsense of all one's fears. England was dreaming her lovely
autumn days away in the sleep which had been hers when, as
a boy, I had come tramping through the shires with loaded
rucsac. It was not until we reached Woking that any sign of
disorder appeared. The Waterloo train stopped and would go
no farther. Clapham Junction and Waterloo were both out of
action through bombs, they said. Only one electric train was
running every hour from Woking to Wimbledon. It was ex
pected at 5 . 3 6 and it came in at 6.40. By then the platform
was jammed so thick with waiting passengers that half of us
were left behind. Two minutes later a megaphone informed us
that another train was leaving in three minutes from platform
3, and we swarmed across to it like refugees. After a wait of
ten minutes a steam train drew in and moved by a common
impulse we surged on board it, breaking even into the guard's
van. Presently the infuriated guard stormed down the train
shouting, 'You can't get on here, this isn't going any farther.'
We dismounted sullenly. We had hardly settled ourselves on
the platform again when a porter pushed among us shouting
'Get on. This train is going on. Surbiton and Wimbledon the
only stops.' We did as we were told, and once again the guard
harangued us, pleading with us to come out again. No one
moved. He might have been invisible for all the attention we
paid to him. The passengers had made up their minds that
the train was going on, and go on it did. I finished my journey
by tube, astonished and appalled to find tube stations filled
with citizens camping on the platforms, their half-naked babies
sprawling with dolls in their arms, the little children tucked
sleeping into blankets on stone platforms. Over them I trod
with infinite and grieving care to reach the exits.
As I came down the road, the alarm siren went, and across
the lawns of the block of flats where I lived I saw my neigh
bours trooping with bedding, suitcases and household pets to
the shelter which was only a garage with a reinforced roof and
new blast walls. Not a single person had ever used it up to the
moment of my going away, and now I found it full of deck
chairs and campbeds at the side of which dogs on leash and
cats in baskets eyed each other vigilantly. If I was to sleep in
my flat, then I should be alone in the whole block, they told
me, and so began a new existence in which one grew to know
260

THE N I G H T OF THE LAND-MINE

one's neighbours as one did one's schoolmates through seeing

them day after day in every human situation. The blitz
disturbed us at all hours, but its span was greatest at night: it
arched the dark hours. There were those who came to shelter
only when the buildings shook and there were the more
systematic shelterers who, after the evening meal, brought
down their bedding and thermos flasks and sat gossiping and
reading, on deck chairs, hair in nets or curlers, with the cairn
of those who for all their lives have done this kind of thing,
and to whom a bomb was a nuisance principally because it
caused them to drop a stitch.
My flat was on the top floor and I was, at first, alone. Into
the ground floor flat beneath me moved a hysterical family
which had fled the bombing elsewhere and hoped to find it
safer in London. The man was of my age. He was out of work,
and ill, and had a wife and two tiny children to support. The
eldest, a boy of about five or six, used to play in the passage
and I had to step carefully over his toy trains and soldiers
when I went out to do my shopping. He played games on the
lawn intended to irritate his father, for there was such tension
between them that they walked round each other like bristling
cats. I saw and heard much from my balcony. He would make
a noise like an air-raid siren and his father would shout from
the kitchen, 'What's that? What's that?' and come to the door
to make certain he was being taken in by his son and shout
fussily, ' Don't do that, David, don't do that. Your mother and
me have about as much as we can stand already.' But if there
were noises which David himself found inexplicable or om
inous, distant mutters or factory noises, or a far-wailing siren
he would rush to his father for reassurance. 'Daddy, is that a
bomb? Daddy, is that the all clear? Did you hear that, daddy?'
If his father failed to answer he would scream out, his voice
mounting, 'Why don't you answer, daddy?' And daddy
would put a lugubrious head out of the kitchen window and
scream back, 'Why don't you stop trying to make us frightened?'
David would carry his toys up several flights of steps to
spread them out on my carpet, and to interrupt my writing
with his prattle. Sometimes his father would come too and I
would get out my records and play something to amuse them
both. I chose the gentlest and most soothing things I could
find for father and son were both unstrung. This was good for
26 1

THE

NIGHT

OF

THE LAND-MINE

m e too during endless days of strain and as I had just bought

Pablo Casal's incomparable recording of the Beethoven Cello
Sonata I had a good excuse for playing it over and over again.
Indeed I have only to listen to it again to-day to evoke all the
atmosphere of those days.
The unhappy father would sit in one of my easy chairs,
hauging his thin wrists between his knees, and listen to the
records and watch his son. He could not bear to see his son
make any mistakes in the jig-saw puzzle he often brought
along and fidgeted with it querulously, saying : ' Look, David,
why don't you do that?' or 'I told you it wouldn't fit.' 'Leave
it alone,' shouted David. 'I told you not to play with it. It's
for Mr. Paul and me. You're not to touch it.' He dashed his
father's hand from the board in a blaze of rage.
'What's wrong with you, David?' his father screamed back.
'I don't understand you, David. Why won't you let me play
with you?'
'Because I don't want you to, that's all,' the boy said with
a set and angry jaw. 'Get away. I don't want you near me.'
His eyes through his pebble spectacles drained of all colour,
the father would turn to me and say, 'You see how he treats me.
You see how he treats his own father. I should have died
rather than treat my own father like that.'
The father looked desperately ill. He was emaciated and
with a face the colour of putty, and his bloodless lips trembled.
He would come to me for sympathy and tell me of worse raids
than ours. 'You know, Mr. Paul, I never had my clothes off for
three weeks. Those raids were unbelievable and that's why
David's in this funny state now.' By a stroke of fate he had
recently lost his own father, to whom he was devoted, and
would tell me endless stories of deathbed scenes : his father had
died of cancer of the throat and had been received into the
Roman Catholic Church just before he died. I came to know
every detail of these events before lang. He had trouble with
his wife. He could not understand her. She was a perfect
stranger to him. 'You're lucky, Mr. Paul, to be a bachelor and
not to know what that means.' And as for David-'You simply
have no idea what it's like to live with him. The boy has a devil
in him, but where he gets it from I can't imagine. Mind you, like
me, he's frightfully sensitive : frightfully. And intelligent, too, but
I tell you, Mr. Paul, he's so unkind to me he's driving me crazy. '
262

THE NIGHT OF THE LAND-MINE

Their worst ordeal-our worst ordeal-was the night the

land-mine fell along the road, blowing half of it away. I used to
go down and sit with David's family out of sorrow and pity
for them all. I was specially miserable about the mother: she
was fine and healthy, with the bloom of a country girl on her
cheeks, and clear, calm grey eyes which surveyed the world
with placid friendliness : the rosy-cheeked baby in her arms
was as quiet and uncomplaining as David was neurotic. I
could see mount on her face a look of distressed incomprehen
sion in the face of family hysteria. David was in such a state of
nerves that his father could no longer cairn him during raids
but he would climb in to my arms and go to sleep if I told him
stories, and in sleep the dark blue rims of fatigue were clearly
visible round his closed eyes, and he would start and tremble
even in the deepest sleep at the sound of the barrage starting up.
We had escaped unscathed so far: or almost. An oil bomb and
two high explosive bombs had fallen one noon, killing the milk
roundsman and the boy delivering the laundry, and setting
fire to the surface of the road, but, despite the toll of ruined
villas growing every day around us, the flats still survived
untouched. That night it was peaceful. The barrage and the
bombs were far away, and the hour came round for my fire
watching duty. 'It's quiet,' snarled my friend belligerently.
'Why do you have to go? David won't be able to sleep without
you.' But even without my fire-watching duty I should have
gone. My legs had pins and needles. I needed a walk. And so,
despite his bad-tempered remonstrances, I curled David up in
the chair I was vacating and let myself gently out into the
night. With a comrade from the shelter, I stood and smoked
at the shelter door and watched the drifting clouds obscure the
stars. Opposite the flats stood a small wood, clothed still in the
ruin of autumn, and from it, on these wet nights, came 1
rank earth smell which set me hungering for scores of such
nights spent around campfires or in a tent at a wood's edge.
Just as my spell of duty was over the raiders began to drop
flares. They fell like great candles, swaying gentl) from side to
side, and laid so mathematically across the night that it was
like gazing up at the lights laid along the dome of an immense
railway station. The guns responded, barking and thumping
and throwing themselves about like chained animals breaking
out of a wooden cage. As I left this scene and went inside a
263

THE NIGHT

OF

THE LAND-MINE

wave of restlessness moaned through the sleepers. I had just

got into the blankets of my bed-chair when the shelter doors
burst open with an ear-splitting blast and in roared a cloud of
dust, in palpable shape, like the entry of Mephistopheles in
Faust. I trembled at the crack, listening for the first time to the
authentic voice of the cosmos, the voice of annihilation. The
walls rocked and groaned and the waking sleepers shouted
'It's the Fiats ! The Fiats !' and the fire-guards dashed out to see
and returned with counter-cries of 'The Fiats are all right!
Keep calm ! Keep calm !'
This explosion was a land-mine half a mile or more away, and
as we were all shouting in the dust and confusion, the second
one went off in the road a few score yards away. The doors burst
open to a thunder which turned our heads into j angled iron.
Fire-guards standing by them were hurled across the shelter
to fall with others into a tangled heap on the fioor. The cig
arette of one of them described a burning parabola which
caused a wave of panic when someone shouted ' Look out, an
incendiary bomb ! ' When the choking dust had subsided we
went outside, certain that the fiats had perished. But they
stood against the skyline unaltered, looking as quiet and as
indestructible in the night as the cliffs of Dover. Across the
lawns I could hear David's wail and the shouting of his father.
Yet no grass could be discovered on the lawn : a detritus of
glass crunched under foot, and one's toes kicked bricks and
timbers thrown anyhow everywhere. I felt with my toes, half
expecting to pitch into a crater. Yet there was none dose at
hand : indeed, except for windows and, one supposed, tiles, the
fiats appeared to have escaped, but northwards along the
street the skyline had vanished. I called out to my terrified
friends in the fiats that all was well and I would return and,
with another shelterer, walked to investigate.
A silhouette which reminded me of the pictures I used to see
as a boy of ruined Ypres greeted me, lit by a wan, fiickering
fiame from the burning gas main in the centre of an un
fathomable cavity where the street had been. The desolation
and silence were intolerable: even one human cry would have
made them bearable. As we walked carefully forward over the
crunching glass, the litter of disintegration, the scraps of
clothing, the splintered wood, the rolling, clanking metal
objects, the indescribable soft things which might be human,
264

THE NIGHT OF THE LAND-MINE

the A.R.P. men came on the scene, dancing round the crater,
like midgets in a surrealist ballet, trying to find means to put
out the flame. Already the bombers were rolling round above
looking at this flame, wondering whether to stoke it up. In
God's name, one wanted to cry, can't you stop it with earth?
A policeman, quite imperturbable, came up and halted us.
We protested we only wanted to help. 'lf you were found
wandering about you might be suspected of looting.' We
returned in silence, stumbling about the unfamiliar geography.
I felt guilty as I returned to the flats. As it happened, too,
the bombers started to unload around us, to feed the fire.
My desertion of David had been at an unlucky moment. There
was a row going on. 'Why don't you do something? Why
don't we go to a shelter?' he was screaming hysterically. 'We
don't know if there's one standing,' his father was shouting.
The lights had failed. The troubled father was scraping feebly
about in his passage-way with a torch. 'l'm sure my head's
bleeding,' the little boy wailed. 'There's sticky all over it.'
'I can't stand it,' his father was crying. 'I can't stand any more
of it. I shall go crazy.'
The glass from the fanlight above the door had exploded over
the frantic family. With my torch I helped pick it off the
crying children. It crunched under my heel even here. David
had a scratch on his forehead, but was otherwise unhurt. 'You
shouldn't have left us, Mr. Paul,' his father said, in the tone
which suggested that my desertion ofthem had conjured up the
land-mine. 'Anyone would think you owned the poor man,'
said his wife. 'No one can make him stay with us.' 'lfyou leave
me I'll kill you,' said David, punching me with his fist. Nothing
would content him but that he should sit on my knee and
listen again to the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby,
exactly as I had told it before the land-mine changed the
constellation of our world. And so he slept, and all of us,
exhausted, slept, though the building continued to rock with
the blast and tumult of the devil dance outside.
In the newly minted morning the road looked like the end of
the world, the day on which God had decided to abandon his
creation to its ruin. A row of shops, a chapel, a terrace of
houses, and half a brewery were heaps of wreckage. In the
whole street the only unwrecked buildings were the flats. They
had been protected by the shops and houses dose to them, but
265

THE NIGHT OF THE LAND-MINE

even s o the extent o f their escape was remarkable. I n my own

flat on the skyline, which now had a direct view of the crater,
only one diamond pane of glass was punched out, and over my
goods was a powdering of dust and plaster.
'We thort you'd gorn,' said my daily treasure, when she
arrived, still quivering from the agitation of the night, to
dean my rooms. 'We 'eard everyfink down 'ere was destroyed.'
I was shocked all over again when I went out to view the
destruction in daylight. There was a ripple nearly two feet
high in the macadam caused by ground concussion, even
though the mine had exploded at house height. On a roof the
mangled chassis of a car was perched. Hundreds of yards
beyond the flats a four foot hole had been blasted in the side of
a house by a boulder propelled like a shell from the crater.
My friends in the flat below me had had enough: they packed
suitcases and bags and fled north, where, in the fulness of time,
the raiders caught up with them again.
I had no time to miss them for, shortly before the blitz that
night, my hell rang lustily and there at the door, suitcase in
hand, was the young poet Lillington, one of the group of
Marxists I had hoped might be turned into couriers of the
socialist underground in the far-off days when Europe was not
at war (and not at peace either) . He was tall and thin and
stooped a little, his black hair wet with rain tumbled about like
the snakes on Medusa's head, and he peered short-sightedly at
me through his spectacles. He raised and flapped his arms like
a large, melancholy crow.
'Blitzed ! '
I brought him in. He sniffed the air, for I was boiling a hock
in the soup saucepan. 'Soup ! ' he cried, 'bee-yoo-ti-full soup ! '
He peered around, restless and excited, a t m y pictures again,
my china. He picked up and rapidly skimmed through some
new hooks resting on my desk, he read what he could of the
page still being typed in the roller of my typewriter. 'Blitz or
no blitz, you do yourself well, Les. I'm going to enjoy being
bombed out. That is if they don't try to do to what's left of
your street what they did to the other half.' And he went
around in happiness among my book shelves, conscious of
the role east on him by his poetry, and enjoying playing at
being the eccentric young poet even more than writing poetry,
and when I said that a meal was ready he misquoted for a
266

THE

NIGHT OF THE

LA N D - M I N E

benediction some lines of Auden : 'Protect this house, this

anxious house where days are counted, From thunderbolt
protect, From gradual ruin spreading like a stain.'
Hardly had my guest taken up his dripping overcoat than the
hell rang again, and there was my sister Marjorie standing
suitcase in hand, in a man's raincoat and wearing a steel
helmet. She put the suitcase down and lifted her arms in much
the same gesture as Lillington's. 'Bombed out.' So henceforth
my blitz nights were not alone : I had gay and amusing com
panions. We boiled immense cauldrons of soup with chunks of
ham ftoating around in them, so that we could have hot meals
at any moment if ever disaster came to us, provided only that it
left the cauldron the right side up. My gramophone records
were pulled out and we played them night after night, cheating
the blitz each time of a portion of its stay. And in the morning,
after all was over, Ken and I would walk the wooded hills
around, to breathe the air, and to forget disaster. He, too, was
waiting for his call-up papers. As it happened, they were
blitzed, and they sent a policeman to fetch him in the end.
And he went off with ftapping protests of his long arms,
his hair. still snakier and in a mood which seemed to hode
trouble for any sergeant, or come to that, general, who got in
his way.
The blitz at first enforced idleness upon me and I watched
anxiously my shrinking balance at the bank. I wrote my
journal, read Ken's journal and discussed it, tinkered half
heartedly with my poems, or wrote long amusing letters when I
could to my brother serving in the North of England and
guarding, among other things, land-mines perched in trees.
Fire-watching helped to pass the midnight hours, and then one
gazed across the forests of chimney pots and saw the purple
ftames which Pepys and Evelyn had seen as a halo of destruction
over London's heart. Yet my idleness did not last: the author
ities decided that the policy of dispersal-no meetings, no
lectures, no dances and no cinemas-was disastrous for
morale. What were the unoccupied people in their masses in
shelters beginning to think of the doom 'dark and deeper than
any sea-dingle' in which their city was foundering! Once again
adult education was called to the rescue-just as it had been
during mass unemployment. There began for me yet another
educational experience: lecturer on foreign affairs to tube
267

T H E N I G H T OF THE L A N D - MINE

stations. I visited shelters which ranged from the crypt of

St. Peter's, Eaton Square, to Bullivants' Wharf in the Isle of
Dogs : I toured Fire Stations, Tube Stations and A.R.P. Posts. I
borrowed a Gaumont-British 1 6 mm. sound projector from the
London County Council and showed talkie films everywhere,
dragging my bulky apparatus around through the shrapnel,
looking for taxis to serve me, and very indignant that the
London County Council would not issue me with a tin hat
(I bought one eventually in a pub for three and six from an
A.R.P. worker) . The film, no matter on what subject, proved
to be the only 'cultural activity' which interested children as
well as adults. The children swarmed like lemmings every
where, of course, and, in the midst of a lecture on the foreign
policy of the U.S.S.R. were quite capable of starting a war of
their own in one corner of the shelter as a protest against their
insufferable boredom.
Lecturing at St. Peter's during a raid one January evening,
and feeling very secure in the staut vaults of the church, I was
irresistibly reminded that I had done all this befare. The vicar
was patriarchally and proprietorially in the chair. Women and
fidgeting adolescent boys and girls sat around in deck chairs.
A glass of water and a green baize whist table had been
provided for me. A curate, lanky and diffident, wandered in and
out: the word ' Chaplain' was painted on his tin helmet. He
was like a figure out of the front line. Beyond the arches on one
side ranged a canteen : on the other a darts match had been
going on: it was stopped when I came in and all were gently
herded forward to listen to me.
A warm carpet stretched across the ftoor, bunks ranged up
to the ceiling. What was it like? Superficially, it was like being
below decks in the steerage of an old-fashioned liner. But
it was far different in atmosphere, and if all the wartime
accretions were disregarded it was, of course, a church institute
on club night! The knitting women, the amber lemonade in
glasses, the hissing urn of tea, the genial vicar, the darts
tournament, the young boys at a loose end rounded up to
listen to the visiting lecturer! The air raid was an accident, the
shelter merely a temporary break in the continuum of English
parish life. The village hall had gone underground.
Returning dog-tired to my flat that night I could hear all
the way up the stairs the telephone bell ringing stridently.
268

THE NIGHT

OF

THE LAND-MINE

I t was Will at the other end. I was almost too weary to talk to
him. He was one of the members of the Marxist group I had so
casually got together and he, now, was in the Army, and
employed as a cook on the strength presumably of the many
strange midnight meals he had prepared in billy-cans over
campfires. He was running youth groups before he had been
called up and I had a special love for him, for I was always
tracing in him the lineaments of the eccentric and idealistic
youth leader I had myself been ten years before-even to the
taste for tweeds, cherry pipes and ash walking sticks.
He said he had been trying to get me for hours as it was
rather important. He was j ust coming home on leave to get
married and would I get his raincoat for him from Len as he
wanted to get married in a raincoat. I was too tired
to remember who Len was or how he had come to be possessed
of Will's raincoat-for Will had been in the Army eight months
-but I said 'yes' to these requests hoping that by morning my
head would be clear once again.
In the morning I forgot all about it, but on the next day
there was a hurried and almost illegible scrawl from Will
saying that after all he was coming home on the 3 0th and that
it did not matter about the raincoat. I could not work out
from the letter whether he was getting married on the 30th, or
coming home on the 3 0th to get married-a subtle difference
and so was compelled to wait for illumination.
He rang me up at midnight that very Friday to say that he
was to be married on Sunday at a registry oftice, and would I
come over and assist at the pantomime? Well, I said, I rather
thought Sunday was dies non for registrars. His girl Barbara
snatched the telephone from him and said, Oh no, it had all
been arranged, and Reg said it was perfectly O.K.
As Reg was an M.P. I thought perhaps it must be all right
and so I said, Well then, where?
Oh we can't say where just yet, but we'll ring you tomorrow
and tell you where.
And what time, I reminded them.
Yes, the time too. That was important.
However, on Saturday night they rang me to say that they
had unfortunately discovered that you could not get married
on a Sunday so it would have to be a Monday.
W ell, I said, I wasn't surprised.
269

T H E N I G HT O F T H E LAND-MINE

Well they were, they said, because Reg had told them it
would be O.K. After all why shouldn't you get married on a
Sunday?
Perhaps the registrar likes to go to Church, I said.
Well, they said, they hadn't thought of that.
Well, where are you now?
Well, they said, we're at Shooter's Hill.
Well, why not come over and stay the week-end?
Well, we thought the traffic stopped in the blitz.
Oh no, I said, it keeps running.
Well, we'll come, they said.
Bring something to eat, I said, I haven't much.
All right, they said, we'll bring bread and marge and sugar.
Some meat, I said.
All right, some meat. We'll be over at six.
They arrived at eleven, beaming and happy and scattily in
love.
Well, I said.
Sorry we're late, they said.
That's O.K., I said, I was j ust gomg to bed, but don't
mind that-come in.
And they came in and talked and talked. Will decided to
try out his cooking on the meat that he brought with him and
went off to the kitchen to experiment, but as this interfered
with the stories of a cook's life in an army camp he was trying to
tell, he kept walking into my study, frying-pan in hand to
relate the bits he would otherwise forget.
Will was a chap of the utmost absent-mindedness. I n pre-war
days he never called to see me without leaving something
behind. A whole platoon of pipes assembled themselves on my
mantelpiece and in my ashtrays. I accumulated in this fashion
spare sports jackets and mackintoshes. So, too, the mysterious
Len must have acquired Will's raincoat. Library hooks alien
to me piled up on occasional tables. I would often get a ring.
'Is that you, Leslie? Did I leave the Analects of Confucius behind
on Sunday?' 'You did,' I would reply. 'Dash it,' he'd sigh with
relief. 'I knew I must have left it behind somewhere. I keep
forgetting to take it back to the library.'
My friends were all of the opinion that Will would forget
to turn up to the wedding. I said they were WTong, he would
turn up all right, but it would be the wrong wedding. Certainly,
2 70

THE NIGHT

OF T H E L A N D - M I N E

they said, he'll forget his wedding-ring. No, I replied, Will

always surprises me. Ten to one he will remember the ring, then
turn round, startled, in the middle of the ceremony and dash
his hand to his brow exclaiming, 'Heavens, where's Barbara?
I know I had her with me when I started out.' And then, I
said, without any doubt, he will ring me.
Marriage was in the air. My young brother came down from
Scotland and with no more than [,6 in the bank married his
girl Gena from my flat. It was perhaps appropriate that one
who had been horn after one of the worst air raids in x g x 8 and
had spent his twenty-second birthday on the beaches of
Dunkirk should drive to his wedding through the thunders
and buffetings of a daylight raid, and be forced to raise his
voice during the marriage vow to compete with the
growlings and trumpetings of the blitz in the street outside.
I was best man. I thought, with a sigh, that I was always
best man. I had been best man to the worst kind of weddings.
I was nineteen or twenty when I was best man to a friend who
was making a runaway marriage with the girl he loved against
her mother's will, and I had to hold the infuriated mother in
conversation while my friend and his bride ran out of the
registry office and bolted up the street for a hus. My hat was
quite ruined by her umbrella and the worst of it was that the
crowd which gathered took her side, thinking that since it was
outside a registry office, and I was togged up to the nines, I
must have jilted her on the starting line, and I too had to run
for a hus.
However, my brother's marriage, hurried and scrappy
though it was, like the marriages of all desperate soldiers who
had to pack a lifetime of happiness into ten days, was a good
and happy one: the only thing which troubled me was that I
was running a temperature which whisky would not quieten.
I saw the young couple go off to Ilfracombe to join my mother
and sister, and then came home to my flat, deserted now since
Marjorie and Ken had left. But everything happens at once:
there on the doormat were my calling-up papers. I had no
more need to struggle against my destiny: it was out of my
hands, and with a sigh of relief that the waiting was over I
poured myself out a tumblerful of sherry and unmindful of the
blitz went to the pictures. I knew that if I stayed at home I
should pace excitedly up and down trying to peer too far into
27 1

THE NIGHT OF THE LAND-MINE

the fu ture, of which I was once again afraid. I t was a strange

coincidence that by the same post there was a month old
letter from Switzerland telling me that Anton Tesarek was
in the dreaded Buchenwald concentration camp while his
son Till, the merry and affectionate little boy who had so
many times visited me, was now a lieutenant in the German
Army.

2 72

CHAPTER S I XTEEN

The Day of the Soldier

he army stripped one bare. It was an experience so difficult

T to communicate to the friends one had left behind that it

raised a barrier not to be crossed again until one was out of

uniform for good : this was specially so with many left-wing
friends who, for all their hatred of Fascism, gazed at one's
uniform with a mixture ofpity and reproach. The bareness was,
to begin with, the fewness of one's possessions. My flat was
surrendered and hooks and furniture sent into store. The
coarse army clothes which filled my kitbag and a few things
in a tiny attache case under my pillow were the extent of my
worth. My hooks were Livingstone's Portrait ofSocrates, J efferies'
Story of my Heart, and Traherne's Felicities. They were joined
presently by a copy of Woodrow Wyatt's English Story which
contained a short story of mine. These lay unregarded for I had
neither the light by night nor the leisure by day to read them
and when, searching frantically for a square of two-by-two, or
the pull-through of my rifle, I caught sight of them, they filled
me with amazement. They were difficult to reconcile
with the rough barrack-room and the two-tier bunks round
which I hurriedly sweptjust before parade every morning.
In the Army one was forced back on to one's inward
resources. In the past, even when things were bad, I had been
fitted as a hand into a glove into the community of which I was
part, and which marvellously supported me. I belonged to a
large family: there was nearly always a room to myself: of
many organizations I flattered myself I was a necessary
member. I was a trade-unionist, co-operator, member of the
Labour Party, President of a flourishing youth movement,
s
2 73

T H E DA Y OF THE

S O LD l E R

chairman of this or that. Or I was lecturer and author, treated

with respect, asked to preside at meetings or to stand for

Parliament. I never strayed far from this warm social herd, nor
thought it possible to stray. But now, and in a few weeks, it bad
quite ceased to exist and even, I suspected, bad lost interest
in me. My youth movement made what I thought was indecent
haste to remove me from the presidency. I was not so indis
pensable as l'd thought. But at least I needed to make no more
decisions now as to what I would do for them, or for myself.
I became for a time indifferent to politics and the course
of the war. Somehow everything would sort itself out. It was a
reliefnot to be compelled to go on producing tidy little opinions
about every new event. I could live with a question, and even
ignore it, and I began to understand the solace T. E. Lawrence
had found in this stripped-down life. I had become 49 2682 9
Pte. L. Paul, and subject ignominously to the will of the
merest lance-corporal, who handed me his webbing gaiters
and belt to blanca whenever he felt like it. The inner iron of
one's pride was the only remedy ane had for the insults and
objurgations hurled at the squad by boys with stripes, or
sergeant-instructors of an earlier generation. Together
they denied the squad parentage, manhood, hope of posterity,
or present excuse for existence. In February sleet and chill we
doubled round the barrack square, and bashed here and there
in platoons on interminable foot and rifle drill, swinging day
by day into a beautiful unison and a bodily resurrection. On
Whittington Common we ran and doubled, like hares, in
scouting games, crawled like snakes through wet bracken,
learning concealment, surprise, flanking movements, and
methods of judging distances. We dug ourselves foxholes and
earth screens and discovered where most murderously to
place rifle and bren gun. We took these lethal weapons to
pieces and had 'naming of parts'--

To-day we have naming rifparts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming rifparts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all rif the neighbouring gardens,
And to-day we have naming rifparts.
2 74

THE DA Y OF THE SOLD! E R

ThiJ i.s the

lower sling swivel. .ANi thi.r

Is the upper sting swivel, whose use you will see,
Whenyou are givenyour slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.*
And so we stepped back into the boyhood world of the
hun ting of quarry and the firing of rifles, and marched, singing
songs of which we never knew more than the first verse, about
the windy Midlands above Lichfield. George Fax had once
come this way in his leather suit and looked down with dis
approval on the spires of Lichfield where we looked with
longing at the southward swinging expresses. The exercise
freshened our eyes and rosied our faces and blistered aur feet,
and roused such enormous appetites that a hot supper at the
NAAFI became the goal and dream of the day.
I was poor once more, and NAAFI suppers were aften out
of the question. Penury was by now so usual an experience
that I could only greet its return with a shrug. But this was
about the worst experience of the lot, I had ruefully to admit,
for my daily pay at first was two shillings and sixpence,
and I allowed my mother ten shillings every week. She was
herself desperately in need and my contribution, added to
those from the rest of the family, helped to keep her in decent
circumstances in Ilfracombe. I was left with seven shillings
and sixpence for cigarettes, Naafi meals, an occasional trip to
the cinema, cleaning materials and leave! An odd guinea or two
from an article or story came like a reprieve to a condemned
man.
I was sometimes a little incredulous that this soldiering life,
into which I entered with great gusto, was my destiny after all.
I had longed most passionately for it in my boyhood in the
First World War, and here I was where I had once wanted to
be after all : but it was an odd joke which thrust me into
uniform and handed me a rifle only after twenty years of
agitation in the cause at first of pacifism and then of peace.
And it was a tu quoque toa that I was forced at last to discover
the masses and to live with them after years of talking so glibly
*From Henry Reed's delightful 'Lessons of the War' in A Map of Verona, Jonathan
Cape, 1 946, with acknowledgements. I first read them in The New Slatesman and

Nation.

2 75

T H E DAY O F THE SO LDIER

about them. With what facility words like the ' masses', 'the
proletariat', 'the working classes' had not so long ago rolled off
my tongue. What folly it had been on my part to imagine I
knew all about them because I mixed with active trade
unionists or talked to a handful ofunemployables ! The members
of the working dass who attend meetings and accept office in
labour movements are an elite: the real masses behind them
can seldom be seen because of the dust their leaders kick up.
But my barrack-room mates were the masses : patient, hard
working, grumbling about authority yet obeying it, avoiding
(in civvy street) public meetings like the plague, and holding
only the most elementary political views, their lives at home
were bounded by desire for wives and sweethearts (and
frustration of this in the Army brought them the most real
suffering) and the tedium of their simple yet exacting jobs in
farm and factory. And here I was caught up with them, in the
most complete mass movement of our generation, which the
masses loathed with all their hearts because it destroyed their
personal lives, yet were no more capable of opposing than if it
were an avalanche, which took them and drilled them and
made them into ciphers in military machines co-extensive
with the entire manhood of the nation. And yet, loathing it,
they felt it was a necessary job, and were not in the least
astonished that they were called upon to do it. They had not
expected otherwise. One saw really what it means to live among
the masses and not among those who simply talk about them
and hope to boss them. It was the kind of revelation only
possible in the army, and in the ranks, and if o ne had no money.
My buddy or mate during those training days was B-
a little man from the Elephant and Castle. He occupied the
bunk below me and so we would sit side by side on his bed
every evening during 'shining parade' and bone our boots and
bayonet scabbards until they shone like black ivory and
with Silvo put a flash into our bayonets which would not have
disgraced a Turkish scimitar. The constant cleaning made the
saw me more than
ends of my fingers sore and when B
usually inept he would grab hold of what I was doing and take
it out of my hands. "Elpless as a bleedin' cockroach,' he would
grumble. 'Giss 'ere.' He had deft fingers, and was an inde
fatigable worker and took pleasure in helping me. Back at the
Elephant he worked I seem to remember, 'for the Borough',
2 76

THE DA Y OF THE SOLD lER

and as with many of the men around me, there was a history
of unemployment he grudged talking about. He was quite the
most comical man in an outfit more than usually blessed with
them and certainly the most lovable. He had a large, Grock
like head, and bright blue eyes, and his fair hair fell in a quiff
over his forehead. He always wore a cheerful, down-like grin.
His large head and small body to which were attached legs and
arms even smaller made him look like a ventriloquist's doll. It
was with very great difficulty he managed the stride of the
drill-squad, and he was for ever huskily complaining that we
were making him do the splits. On his own, his short, rapid
steps gave him the appearance of trotting everywhere, head up,
like an intelligent terrier. But he could stretch his legs rather
more easily than his arms and during arms drill he was in
torment. An hour before this parade, his face would be
puckered with worry, for as he knew, once it began anything
might happen. It was certain that the sergeant would bawl,
'Get that angle straight, B
would shoot
!' and B
up his forearm to tilt the rifle back over his shoulder only to
have the same rasping and insulting voice tell him a moment
or two later just how horizontal he should keep his forearm. If,
later, in his zeal to bring his rifle across his body on to his
shoulder at the order ' Slope arms' he tried to make good by
energy for physical deficiencies, the rifle might miss his neg
ligible shoulders and hurl itself across the squad to impale the
man behind him. He was most happy when the parades and
deaning of the day were done and he could turn to me with his
Grock-like grin, and say, in his deep hoarse voice, 'Comin' to
the Naffy, matey?' And we would go across together, the long
and the short of it, a most incongruous pair, and sit and drink
mugs of tea and plough through 'meat pie and mashed'. 'What
we oughter 'ave, matey, is some of them stooed eels from o ne of
them Elephant cookshops. Blimey, they're a bit of what mother
makes.' 'Get your wife to post you a carton of jellied eels,' I
suggested. 'No bleedin' use, matey. There ain't no cookshops
left since Jerry bombed 'em.' Then we would exchange
reminiscences about the Elephant and its cookshops, which I
knew almost as well as he did, for when as a boy I went to
St. George's Eye Hospital, my mother, who was no snob about
food, used to take me for stewed eels and mashed and huge
custard pies in the dean, scrubbed eating houses which had
277

T H E DA Y OF THE S O L D I E R

still in those days sanded floors, and polished brass spittoons,

and ferns set out in green and cream flower pots along the
tiled ledges of the shopwindows. At one, in Newington Butts,
where one could get the best roast beef and Yorkshire
pudding in London, I had been eating until it was destroyed
's wallet and he
in the blitz. Presently out would come B
would pass over to me the well-thumbed portrait of his wife and
little boy of nine. He talked of them because he was anxious
about them: London was still being heavily bombed, if at
langer intervals, and from the Elephant and Castle southwards
stretched a great trail of destruction. He spoke of me as his
' matey'. If he came into the barrack room, and found me
missing, he would say a little anxiously to the rest, 'Seen my
matey around?' and when I had to rest on my bunk from the
effects of inoculation he was for ever fetching me cups of tea
and wads of cake from the N aafi.
He had the opinion also that I was a 'caution'. This dated
from the time of arrival, a week later than the rest of the squad.
Mter I had collected most of my kit Lance-Corporal Potts
asked me if I'd got my biscuits. I said no, I hadn't-and
thinking, I must admit, of the iron rations of the First World
War I asked where you got them. 'From the bleeding cook
house,' he said. 'Where d'you think?' And he told me what I
could do with them when I got them. So I presented myself
zealously at the cookhouse, still in civvy clothes, and told them
I'd been sent down by Lance-Corporal Potts for some biscuits.
This brought on the scene a group of cookhouse orderlies eager
to take a look at the professional chap, who hiding behind
hornrimmed spectacles, was guilty of this drollery. It
took me some time to discover that 'biscuits' to the barrack
room were mattresses in three parts. One put them together and
slept on them. Each buttoned square of mattress did resemble
in colour and shape a large dog biscuit, as a matter of fact.
But no one could possibly believe that I had done this out of
innocence. They were sure it was a kind of waggery on my
part-'taking the mike out of Pottsy'. I did nothing to disabuse
them of this all too flattering point of view, and my reputation
increased with time.
It was the practice to call out the whole barracks to 'stand-to'
whenever there was an air raid alarm at night. Nothing ever
happened except that a few German planes roared over to
2 78

THE DA Y OF THE SOLDIER

drop bombs on Birmingham or Coventry, and local ack-ack

guns let fly at them. 'It's stupid,' I expostulated to the barrack
room, 'to lose all that good sleep. The Army's crazy.' And so,
after turning out on the first night of my arrival, I decided not
to bother any more. After all, I said, at large, 'we never used to
get up for anything as feeble as this in London'. 'Blinkin'
caution, you are matey,' said B
. Three nights later,
a
general
alarm,
I
turned
over
on
to
the other side to go to
upon
sleep again, while my angry comrades clattered in their boots
all over the barrack room floor and down the stone stairs. Potts,
I noticed, wasn't troubled either and snored from a far corner.
Yet now, with a wonderful peace around me, I could not
sleep : the emptiness of the room oppressed me. As ever, I grew
curious. It was my besetting sin. What on earth were they
doing down there in the dark? I felt conscience-stricken, snug
in bed while they tripped around in the dark with fire-buckets.
At last I got up, slipped on my greatcoat and painful army
boots, and went downstairs just in time to add myself to a file of
muttering soldiery bumping off somewhere in the stygian
night. The file meandered around uncertainly and came to a
flagstaffwhich I recollected was in North Staffs territory, and a
corporal whose voice I did not recognize read out a list of
unfamiliar names (of which mine was not one) to which the
soldiers responded with that sycophancy of which only new
recruits and prep-schoolboys are capable. And so we were all
distnissed. Regretting my folly in leaving my bed, I groped
my way back to my block, found my barrack-room, and went
to bed. My platoon was still missing. When they did return,
they found me fast .asleep.
In the morning I was paraded with the defaulters and
putting the best air possible on my misadventure told how 1
had turned out but got mixed up with a file of the North
Staffs, and when I discovered my mistake and left them, was
quite unable to find my own platoon, and returned to my
barrack room. It turned out that my own squad had been taken
on a night tour of water buckets and fire pumps, to their utter
misery. My nerve in staying in bed was, they thought, capped
by the brazen impudence of my story. Only a genius would
have conceived a yarn like that and got away with something
as mild as three days' C.B. and the job of scrubbing out the
company office. Most eagerly now, they saw, my yarn about
'2 7 9

T H E DA Y OF THE SOLD l E R

the biscuits was waggery of the same sort, and they began to
think it possible I might go far in the Army. My ascendancy
in the squad made young Potts a little nervous, and he would
come and consult me anxiously about talks he had to give on
map-reading or j udging distances, about which he knew
nothing. He wanted to know 'how, sort of, you would phrase
it', which meant that he wanted me to prepare his lesson for
began to grow anxious about me, too : if I was
him. B
unaccountably absent somewhere he would put that down
eithr to a new piece of waggery on my part, or to the poss
ibility that, being a writer, I had forgotten what next I ought
to do : and so he would come in search of me. When I explained
to him how easy it was to slide off to the Church Army hut on
the common during the hour everyone had to wear a gasmask,
because no one could possibly recognize you then, and you
could not hear any orders shouted at you from inside a mask, he
grew quite nervous and lectured me most earnestly. I was
spoiling my chances of becoming an officer. He had a special
interest in promoting my career, for he had a theory that I
should be able to apply for him one day to become my batman.
By an odd coincidence when I did go to OCTU I found that he
was one of the orderlies there, prepared to bat for me when his
other Iabours were done.
Yet another simple fellow was a huge man S
who
possessed a chest like a barre! and a jutting jaw. When he wore
his steel helmet he looked even more aggressive than Mussolini,
and rather like him. Yet he was a Damon Runyon character,
as tender-hearted as a child, and no matter what punishments
the sergeants threatened him with, they could never work him
up to an aggressive spirit when it came to poking his bayonet
into the viscera of the sacks hanging on gibbets between the
barrack buildings. We had to form in lines and two at a time
with bayonets fixed, charge down on the sacks making blood
curdling noises. 'In, out, on guard !' we shouted as we
stabbed the straw. It was one of the things best to do quickly,
and without too much thought about its murderous
implications. But no matter with what bloody a mien they
to hurl himself along the
persuaded the lumbering S
concrete, when he came to the sack he gave it the most gentle
and apologetic of pokes, and was even in a sweat about that.
The sergeant would wrench the weapon from him and shout :
280

THE DA Y O F T H E SOLDIER

'Not like that, you so-and-so, like this !' and with professional
savagery thrust and thrust and make the gibbet rock. Turning
a piteous and bewildered eye on us for support, S
would
take back the weapon and, with less ferocity than the old ladies
of my childhood displayed in poking a hatpin through a bannet,
prod the dangling man of straw. 'Oh, you make me tired !' the
sergeant would say, and, with searing comments on his private
life, send him back to the line where he drooped with the fear
that in a moment or two he would have to do it all over again.
could not read or write and every day or so he
S
would humbly ask me to write a letter for him to his mother,
and would bring me the replies to be read out. One
day, in the greatest happiness, he came waving a telegram:
with eyes shining with delight at such a thing he cried
out, 'Look, someone sent me this. Never had one befare. What
does it say?' I was rushing up the stone stairs to change for
P.T. parade and he followed me to my bunk. lfis noisy pleasure
brought others round. But the telegram said that his
mother had been seriously inj ured in an air raid and he was
to come at once, or it might be too late, and one of the hardest
tasks of my life was to summon the courage then and there to
kill the childish glee in his eyes.
If my pennilessness was to be with me for at least a year in
the Army, my obscurity did not, on the other hand, last for
more than a few months. Befare entering the forces I had been
lecturing here and there to atten tive audiences of soldiers, or to
groups of officers lounging in easy chairs in the ante-rooms of
their messes, and chiefly on the causes and progress of the war.
O ne of my hosts had been Colon el Lloyd, commanding officer
of the 22nd Medium and Heavy Training Regt. R.A. at
Shoeburyness; a generous and outstanding soldier, he had
proposed to me that I should let him know when I was actually
called up and he would have me transferred to his command so
that under him I might continue educational work for his
troops of the kind I had already done. I ought to go, he
thought, into the Army Educational Corps. 'Between you and
me,' he said, 'you're too old for an infantry commission, and an
artillery commission would mean specialization. You'd much
hetter do the kind of thing you are doing.' I clutched at this
hope, and wrote while in training at Lichfield, and Col.
Lloyd kept his word, and at the end of my training I found
28 1

T H E D A Y O F T H E S O L DI E R

myself posted to Shoeburyness Garrison. It was not good to see

my comrades march off to fill drafts, white I was left behind to
await the date of my own dispatch. What a transformation
there was among them: these tired men in their thirties stepped
out briskly and bore themselves erect and soldierly behind the
band which marched them to the station. Some of them
eventually found themselves serving with the Chindits in
Burma and others with the Desert Rats : the unfit were destined
for garrison duty at home, like B
. I had no band to
march me to the station. lndeed I had no transport at all, and
was compelled to stagger along to Lichfield Station in the early
morning, like an overburdened Christmas tree carrying kitbag,
webbing equipment, blankets and rifle as if l were to be allowed
to fight a campaign on the east coast all on my own. In London
my plight was worse, for I arrived on the morning of May 1 2th
1 94 1 , after one of the worst fire-blitzes on London. No traffic at
all was running through the city, not even the underground,
and I could reach Fenchurch Street Station only by passing
through burning streets, tangled with hoses and piled high
with smoking rubble over which firemen and rescue workers
still crawled. The journey would have been impossible but for a
messenger boy with a barrow: with my kit piled high upon it
we struggled through the smoke-wreathed city, the May sun
brassy above us.
My life in Shoeburyness barracks was the private soldier's
dream ofheaven. I lived in a warm, dean Belisha barrack room
with the daily comfort of hot baths and hot water to shave with.
My superior was an Army schoolmaster, a regular soldier who
had taught in Hong-Kong, Egypt and, of course, Aldershot. His
name was Meacher and he signed it with the round, flowing
school hand bred of much chalking on blackboards. He was a
plump little man with a red nose who looked just like W. C.
Fields: he possessed even his Micawberish dignity and, beaming
and joking to his classes, something of his humour too. Because
his rank was equivalent to that of Regimenta! Sergeant Major
he enjoyed most of the privileges of an officer and much more
freedom : indeed with a bungalow and batman he shared with
the R.S.M. he was most comfortably situated. His only cause
for complaint was that an incendiary bomb had recently fallen
through his roof. Meacher treated me with the utmost con
sideration, protected me from the resentments of the
282

T H E DA Y OF T H E S O L D lER

disciplinary side of the barracks, and allowed me to arrange

my own programme. So there I was, a simple gunner, travelling
around to gunsites between Canvey and Foulness Islands,
talking to small groups of soldiers on contemporary affairs. In
my abundant leisure I pursued my delight in geography and
painted the schoolroom walls with vast world maps. My
colleague in the schoolroom, a Lance-Bombardier, was a
brilliant mathematician who played the flute, and under his
encouragement I took up my boyhood love once again, and by
practising several hours a day in the deserted schoolroom we
both made considerable progress : indeed we began to play
duets. By this happy accident new delights were opened up to
me and the thready sweetness of our flutes became one of the
familiar daily sounds of the busy barracks.

CHAPTER SEVENT E E N

Dialogue of the Heart

A t last, removed from the blitz, from the cares of civilian

l"\. life, with the pressure of the military machine temporarily
lifted, and the opportunity once again to think, to
read, and to stroll where I wished without being bawled at by
NCO's I could come to grips with the problems which I had
with despair put on one side about a year before. The greatest
of them was-what now to believe?
On the outbreak of war I had discarded the remnants of my
pacifism. Until that day I had always been able to delude
myself with the consolation that, if I wanted to, I could refuse
military service on the grounds of my record in peace or
pacifist movements. But when the war actually came, I knew
that this was self-deception. One could not be a pacifist if one
longed with all the ardour of one's soul for the defeat of
National Socialist Germany. One's pacifism would then have
been a dishonest and contemptible decision to leave to others
to secure by death and suffering the victory one refused
to fight for oneself. I was uneasily conscious that, since exemp
tion had become so easy, and involved no martyrdom of any
kind, it was necessary to be quite sure that a desire to escape
military service was not prompted subconsciously by something
quite different from 'principles'. Of many of the pacifists I met
I was suspicious. It often seemed to me that their 'pacifism'
was a variant of nihilism, an aggressive refusal to accept a1!)1 of
the burdens and obligations of living in a society, and only too
often the fruit of an unadmitted neurosis. Principles and
personal honesty made it impossible for me to refuse service :
the war became for m e a test of my manhood which I could not
284

DIALOGUE OF THE HEART

reject. But this decision widened the gap between me and the
youth movement I had founded, and once led to a pacifist
position : many of the active leaders rejected military service
very self-righteously even though they had seen their comrades
in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland go down
under the Nazi terror.
In the spring of 1 940, inwardly torn by many confticting
views on the course of history, I made an attempt to reconsider
the war situation in Marxist terms. In a paper I wrote to read
to my friends I rejected the Leninist thesis about the First
World War, which was, of course, that the war was no concern
of the proletariat whose only task was 'to turn the imperialist
into the civil war' or in other words to turn its guns against
its own bourgeoisie. This Leninist thesis was held in all its
purity by the Trotskyists in the Second World War: it appeared,
in 1 940, to be held by the Stalinists too, but their Marxist
analysis on these lines was quite a dishonest one. It could not
be squared with a propaganda six years old which argued that
Fascism was the first enemy of the working-class : this Moscow
line might, I guessed, vanish any day with a turn in the war
unfavourable to the national prospects of the U.S.S.R. I
wrote that it was stupid and dangerous to imagine that the
proletariat was morally indifferent to the victory of one side or
the other. Even in terms of realism about human loyalties, it
was a fantasy worthy of Dean Swift to ask German workers to
fight for the victory of Britain, and British workers to fight for
the victory of Germany! But even if the policy of 'revolutionary
defeatism' was possible in certain historical circumstances, it
was irrelevant to the ideological struggle of the Second World
War. The most obvious thing about the war was that there was
a difference in the moral weight of the protagonists. The
western nations accepted certain basic assumptions about the
rights of men, the maintenance of justice, the honouring of
truth. Whatever the evils and follies of the bourgeois order of
the West, it entered into the struggle with this basically
civilized point of view : even a bourgeois order, I said, could be
inftuenced by a moral imperative. This was not the case on
the other side: it was not the case in Russia either, for her
alliance with Germany was even more cynical than the
Munich agreement.
Secondly, I argued, there was a difference between the
285

DIALOGUE OF THE HEART

protagonists in their approach to the social question. The

victory of the democracies meant the preservation of the right,
precious to the working dass, freely to organize and struggle
for the attainment of power. On the other hand, the triumph of
Fascism would mean the destruction of democracy and the
physical massacre of the leadership of the trade union and
labour movements. Mere commonsense dictated that we should
work for the victory of the side which assured us the possibility
of carrying on the struggle.
I read this thesis to my little Marxist group : it was the last
time we met as a whole befare war dispersed us utterly: three
of its five or six male members were already in uniform: the
girls they had married or were about to marry were there too :
we talked with bottles of beer at our side and cigarette smoke
thick as a fog in my study which looked across to the treetops
of the miraculously preserved little wood. But we all felt
acutely the unreality of this mechanical kind of thinking.
The truth was that we had all made a decision to serve in the
forces out of something much more profound in us than
Marxism. There was something indecent about shoving our
personal responsibilities on to the Marxist waggon, and making
the materialist conception ofhistory the excuse for a duty which
sprang out of a moral anger against Fascism. These things were
not said, for they would have sounded pompous and senten
tious: it simply happened that the Marxist discussion died on
our hands, its threadbareness in face of the complex and
dynamic events of history, apparent at last. These young men,
having made what the postwar world would have called an
existentialist choice, did not want it boringly elaborated in a
memorandum. Death and catastrophe made our revolutionary
apologetics sound silly. And we had ceased to be revolutionaries :
in that last effort we ceased even to be Marxists. It was not
very surprising. The most damning intellectual failure of
Marxism which is, of course, very specifically an apparatus of
historical prediction, was its inability to forecast the coming of
Fascism, and its incapacity to analyse it when it came. Around
us, for a very long time, the left-wing world had buzzed with
the lies and humbug of the Communist Party and its fellow
travellers. Marxism had become what George Orwell called a
'smelly little orthodoxy' ready for any evil persecution. I, and
my friends, came to look upon this with such scorn and
286

DIALOGUE OF T H !: HEART

contempt tbat gradually the whole Marxist intellectual

apparatus became suspect. I bad come to believe that with
out a moral basis there could be no human advance. Peguy's
aphorism-'La revolution sociale sera morale, ou elle ne sera
pas,' was always on my lips. Many times in the weeks that
followed the May discussion I turned over my memorandum,
depression thick upon me: I was judging Marxism, I
realized, by a moral code prior to it, and my judgment bad so
far disgusted me with the consequences of Marxism in Russia
and elsewhere that I now began to believe that Marxism was as
much the enemy of mankind as Fascism itself. What was I
doing then, writing memoranda in its language? I tore up my
thesis, but in what, in the future, I was to rest my view of
human destiny I had no idea.
There was another aspect of the dilemma which I had often
discussed with the young poet Lillington-the aesthetic one.
There was a spiritual sickness over poetry, and it seemed, over
music and painting too. The aridity, dehumanization, and
fragmentation of contemporary art were inescapable phenom
ena. I had followed the movement which had begun with the
publication of New Signatures, under the editorship of Michael
Roberts, in 1 932, with the utmost interest and excitement.
Here, at last, seemed to be the authentic poetic voice of my own
generation, bringing to literature a mood free from Georgian
sentimentalities and an ability to sing about other things than
nightingales and roses :-about pylons and railway trains, for
example! But the poets who had exulted with Rex Warner in
the early thirties

Come then, companions. This is the spring of blood,

heart's hey-day, movement of masses, beginning of good.
had fallen away from their revolutionary exultation. A strange
malaise had crept into their work. And the new school had
come in fact to an abrupt end with the departure of Auden and
Isherwood to America just before the outbreak of war in 1 939
This gesture was so clearly a rejection of the war for survival
into which Britain was about to plunge that none could mistake
its import. The poets had left the society about to die: those
who, as artists, had most compellingly proclaimed the poet's
engagement in society had rejected it. But I had become con
vinced also that they had long been rejecting poetry too.
28 7

DIALOOUE O F THE H EART

The poets of the New Signatures group-Auden, Spender,

Day Lewis, John Lehmann, A. S. J. Tessimond and others
were hostile to a poetry of escape and sought to make English
poetry again 'popular, elegant and contemporary art'. They
succeeded in producing a new manner, deeply influenced by
T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence, and almost a
new aesthetic. But it was the new aesthetic, rather than the
new manner, which was their doom. It was one thing to write
in a fresh manner, because the old was worn out and had
become an imitative poetising: but it was quite another to
announce a new social basis for the aesthetics of poetry. The
refusal to escape as the Georgian poets had done, demanded
for its completion a decision to engage, and the most pressing
problem these new poets felt faced with, as their essays and
poems themselves bear witness, was how to take part fully as
poets and as men in the struggle of the period. It is worth
recalling what that period was. Over the whole world the
blight of unemployment lay like an inexplicable palsy. The
breakdown of the industrial system which prevented millions
from working, condemning them to idleness, despair and self
loathing, produced a spiritual catastrophe not limited to the
unemployed : it made the employed man feel socially guilty
because of his privilege of employment: the comfortably
situated middle dass felt in the words of Auden, that

The creepered wall stands up to hide

The gathering multitudes outside
Whose glances hunger worsens)
Concealing from their wretchedness
Our metap!rysical distress,
Our kindness to ten persons.
From the dilemma of unemployment, a rational escape
seemed easy: all that was necessary in strict logic was to
set the unemployed working to produce the things for lack of
which men were dying. Yet such a remedy was beyond society:
it predicated agreements within societies and between nations
as to proper social ends, and no such agreements could even be
contemplated-the tensions were too great. Never did a remedy
seem simpler sense or more impossible of achievement. The
intellectuals were in the hopeless situation of attempting to
wean a drunkard from his tipple. War and revolution were the
288

D IALOGUE OF T H E HEART

only ways left, it seemed, and the young students and scholars,
the poets and artists of the early thirties, inevitably felt the pull
of the logic and fire of the Marxist ideology which said so. It
was towards Marxism that they turned. The volume New
Country, the sequel to New Signatures, published in 1 933 is,
intellectually, mostly devoted to arguing out the revolutionary
case. 'A Communist to others', ' Letter to a Young Revolu
tionary', 'Poetry and Revolution' are the contributions of
W. H . Auden, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender respectively.
If any collective decision stands out it is the argument of
Michael Roberts who, in his Preface, asserts that 'there is only
one way of life for us: to renounce that system now and live by
fighting against it' .
Auden wrote, in the remarkable poem Spain which was to
follow some years later, what was almost the poetic manifesto
of the group :

resterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
resterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the beliej in the absolute value of Greece,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
In the banishment of everything which did not directly
further the revol ution (or the struggle against Fascism, with
which it had become deliberately identified) poetry was
included :

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks ofperfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the
struggle.
Yet the struggle could not bring the poets much co mfort.
It promised only increased disaster and insecurity, and cer
tainly less freedom and safety in the foreseeable future, which
ever side emerged victorious. The political hell of Germany in
T
289

D 1 A L O G U E OF THE HEART
1 93 2 and 1 933 might very well prove to be, the young poets
thought, the pattern of the future in which they would have
to live, fight and die, anything but poets. But if they achieved
instead the political heaven of the Soviet State, what consola
tion was there in that either?
Auden wrote in Lettersfrom Iceland :

Our prerogatives as men

Will be cancelled who knows when;
Still I drink your health before
The gun butt raps upon the door
and poem after poem from almost any member of the group
shows the same shrinking from violence, and loathing of the
bloody world. They were strung in an unbearable tension
between the wish to work resolutely in that world and the lang
ing to reject its cruelty and hate. So Spender ( The Still Centre) :

Oh let the violent time

Cut eyes into my limbs
As the sky is pierced with stars that look upon
The map ofpain.
But what could possibly be expected of such a spiritual tension
except that

My perceived rent world wouldfly

In an explosion offinal Judgment
To the ends of the sky.
Many poets felt themselves dedicated, against their. will,
and against their longings as poets, to revolutionary action
which would ruin the scholarly and freedom-loving society in
which they were nurtured. Such a split mind could not,
naturally, avoid injuring their poetic will. But worse was to
come. For Marxism has always possessed its own aesthetic. It
had in those days many able expositors who produced works
of genuine scholarship like Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and
Reality. And this aesthetic faced the would-be Marxist poets
with the logic of their own situation. To Caudwell poetry was
to be regarded 'not as anything racial, national, genetic or
specific in its essence, but as something economic'. He argued
that an examination of the origins of poetry showed a parallel
between the increasing complexity of the division oflabour and
290

D I A L O GUE OF T H E HEART

the poetica! development based upon it. Culture, he argued,

cannot be separated from economic production or poetry
from social organization. There would come a time when a
genuine popular art would be based upon the social and
economic complex of the entire classless society: then you
would have an art of a higher consciousness because based on
the aspirations of the entire people and not upon those of a
privileged group, the bourgeois. Art born of the social fission
is only half art. 'The ravages apparent in modem consciousness
show that man can hardly endure the pangs of this dismem
berment (of society) .' But the bourgeois artist cannot by an act
of will turn himself into a proletarian or communist artist
because he dislikes bourgeois society. Three roles only are
possible for the bourgeois artist-opposition, alliance and
assimilation. Assimilation, the most desirable of all goals,
which meant ceasing to be a bourgeois artist and becoming a
proletarian artist, was the most difficult for the young
poets. For, according to the Marxist aesthetic, it meant
surrendering bourgeois standards and ideas-leaving the past,
and identifying oneself with the future. This for the poets
meant the surrender of their critical and aesthetic background
and the creative heritage of the poetry which had made them
poets. How could they know that, ceasing to be bourgeois poets
they could possibly become even proletarians, let alone pro
letarian poets. If their poetry was the consequence of their
social condition, could they ever write any other kind than
that which came to them spontaneously? If opposition was not
to be thought of, there remained only alliance. But this was
most of all to be condemned. To Caudwell, at least, the roman
tie young revolutionary imported a Trotsky-like element into
the cause; he made conditions : he demanded certain freedoms :
he would let the party touch everything except his poetry.
'It gives even the revolutionary element in their art a Fascist
tinge' Caudwell said. So what more miserable plight could the
young poets be in, who found that their effort to identify them
selves with the cause of proletarian revolution only drew down
upon them the accusation that they remained bourgeois still,
shut out of the new world and even, if the truth be known,
Fascist in temper.
Sadly the new poets had to admit to themselves that they
were, after all, bourgeois. In any case, in the degree that it
29 1

D I A L O GUE O F' T H E HEART

was their vocation to write poetry it was not their vocation to

starve in doss-houses or sweat in mines, but to write, to teach,
to lecture from university platforms, or labour at editorial
desks. What could they do to be saved and keep their poetry?
They did not know: it did not seem that poetry was . worth
writing, even though they could not help writing it.
The root of the thing was that the revolutionary poets had
capitulated ignobly befare the ideologies. Marxism and Freud
ianism had convinced them that poetry had no validity in
and for itself: it was sickness, delirium or propaganda. They
returned, by way of communism, to that uncertainty of which
Michael Roberts spoke in the introduction to New Signatures.
He said that the effect of pure science had been to undermine
our absolute beliefs and that, as we no langer possessed a moral
hierarchy 'we are left with only an empirical knowledge that
certain things make us uncomfortable'-though not even he,
in those days, would have suspected that writing poetry was to
become one of them.
In men nevertheless genuinely poets this spiritual defeat
was a terrible thing to see. It was one more item of evidence
about the plight of the contemporary world. It was a personal
matter too, for the ideologies had laid a chill hand on my own
poetry, which had never fulfilled the promise of 'The Song of
Creation'. I was compelled to ask myself why powerful
contemporary doctrines like Marxism and Freudianism had no
use for the creative activities of man, and could only denigrate
or deny them. It is easy to state now that it was because they
did not believe in man, and therefore certainly could not explain
those things which were most typical of man. But then I was
only groping towards the realization that Marxism was pushing
man out of the way altogether in favour of a 'process'. Marx
ism, it was clear from the Russian experiment, had far less
interest in helping man than in saving 'his tory'. And for
Freudianism civilized man was a neurotic; hetter it would be
for him to be a beast untroubled by conscience, inhibition,
fear and guilt. The full consequence of the banishment of the
fully-grown, freely acting man from the world I had yet to
grasp, but it was in those days that I began to struggle towards
the theme of The Annihilation cif Man, the book I wrote mostly,
at night, and by hand, in an attic in Sprowston near Norwich,
between Christmas and Easter 1 943. But already it
292

D IALO G U E O F T H E HEART

seemed to me that the war itself sprang out of the hatred of the
modern world for the spirit-and therefore for man-and that
what might go down, no matter who was victorious, was
civilization itself. It was in connection with these arguments
with myself that I first began to ask-what was the meaning
of the civilization against which I had so long turned my
own fire? I had grown up with Jefferies, Edward Carpenter,
and Walt Whitman, and read my Thoreau, and considered
my youth work to be part of the cure of man from the disease
of civilization. Now that this game, played by so may intellec
tuals and poets, was having some success, civilization appeared
to be about to leave us any moment for a hetter world. When
warring against civilization we had taken as read the values
behind it-values of truth, j ustice, mercy, creativity-which
would be the hetter for its passing. Now I began to think that
those of us on the left had taken all too much for granted the
moral and intellectual equipment of our times, and believed
that we could not harm it by making war on society. The
reckoning for this folly was descending on us like an avalanche.
I was troubled too about the meaning of the word spirit.
Even Caudwell, stern materialist that he was, talked about
saving the spiritual activities of man. But what was the spirit?
Was it simply a word we gave to a kind of atmosphere generated
by certain human activities, like the word 'excitement',
therefore, or had it a meaning in its own right, standing
as surely for some reality as matter stood for some reality? I
wanted to get at the metaphysical problem standing behind
the aesthetic one. When, seven years before, I had been so ill
and had rested for weeks under the pear tree in the kindly
house which German bombs had half destroyed since,
I used to carry on to the lawn a portable wireless set. For the
first time in my life I had the leisure to listen to music and so
deep a hunger for it that I felt that without it I should never
recover. The B.B.C. was passing through one of its Bach
phases and cantatas and chorale preludes came often over
the air, not all understood or appreciated by my untrained
ear, but pregnant with something I had to try to under
stand.
The meaning of music baffied me. Speech has a certain con
creteness which can be intellectually handled : to certain sounds
precise objects or states can be attached-'dogs', 'eat', 'hunger'
293

D I A L O GUE OF THE HEART

and 'thirst'. Music lacks this: the effort to produce a synthetic

concreteness results only in dull programme music. Yet music
was not, because of this, un-intellectual or anti-intellectual. It
was a statement above the level ofintellect. Ifit was a communi
cation of the most profound sort, not in stric tiy in tellectual terms,
then I had also to ask-to what part of me was it addressed?
It was useless to reply-the emotional: for what was the me which
loved, hated and feared? It was a problem that could only
present itself to the materialist. On the materialist plane
tickling one's ear with sounds ought to have the same im
portance that tickling one's foot with a feather had. 'Pushpin
was as good as poetry,' that silly old man Jeremy Bentham had
once said. But if, just for the sake of hypothesis, one admitted
the existence of an entity called 'spirit' then one could admit
immediately communications, such as music and poetry, of
spirit to spirit. One could make sense of it all only by ceasing
to be a materialist. But if one ceased to be a materialist, what
then? Where intellectually was one's resting place? I had come
gradually deeply to distrust those who went around proclaim
ing their materialism and their atheism, yet imported into
their hard creed all sorts of ideas intolerable within it-as that
there ought to be justice in the world, and freedom of speech
and conscience, and self-development for every child. How
could materialism contain a moral ought? How could it talk so
loosely about 'the spirit' of man, of civilization, of mercy, or of
anything else?
In music I had pursued spiritual realities to their source,
time and time again, in the liturgies of Christianity. Music
contained the most tremendous humanist and Christian state
ments. How my friends used to praise the Mass in B Minor!
How often I heard it discussed, or read of it! There seemed to
be a conspiracy to think of it as pure music, divorced from
human or social reality. I felt like the Marxists about it, and
often longed to say 'but surely the whole point about it is that
it is an act of most devout worship?' But if I said so, no one
seemed to regard it as significant: my remark was received in
silence, as though it were a social faux pas. The art was valid :
the faith on which it was based was dismissed as irrelevant.
This made so little sense to me that I felt the exact opposite :
if the art was valid, then surely in some sense the belief must be
valid too? If one revered the flowering of the human spirit
294

DIALOGUE O F T H E HEART

through centuries of European history, could one so easily

dismiss the soil of faith in which it all grew?
Y et when one stated this one faced a second contemporary
conspiracy-to dismiss religion ( except in an anthropological
sense) as unworthy of the serious attention of modem man.
One could discuss it in a hostile way, but not sympathetically.
To admit the possibility of belief in it was rather like supposing
that witches flew on broomsticks : it was primitive, dead,
abandoned by modem man. Marx and Freud, the mentors of
most of my contemporaries, dismissed religion out of hand.
Marxism argued that it was a soporific, invented specially by
the bourgeoisie, though the bourgeois order was the first in
European history in which religion came seriously under attack.
But there it was, the attack on religion was as important to
Marxism as the attack on capitalism. The ineptitude of the
Marxist analysis had become plain to me. To Freud it was a
neurosis and therefore man stood just as much in need of a cure
for a religious neurosis as if it were a fetishist disease like cutting
off the pigtails of little girls. If Marx was inept, Freud was
callow: so colossal a dismissal of man's everlasting longing for
answers to his questions about his nature and destiny would
better have come from a morose adolescent than a man of
science and humanity.
I could extract nothing but disgust from the superficiality of
contemporary attacks on religion. If I could not be a
thorough-going materialist where was there a resting place for
mind or spirit short of religion? Most of my contemporaries were
not thorough-going materialists : they flinched from so merciless
a creed. But they were not religious either. They imported into
a vague religiosity a materialist content: or sprinkled over their
materialism a holy water of idealism. Even the Marxists were
idealist-materialists.
All my leftism was falling to pieces in my hands. I was
trying to fit together a jigsaw of parts which crumbled as I
picked them up. What dusty incoherence it looked now, this
museum of 'isms-materialism, atheism, anti-clericalism,
vegetarianism, free-sexism, pacifism, communism, syndicalism,
socialism-each with its self-righteous patter, which made up
what had been for me the inescapable pattem of left thinking
and left action. Now where was the sense in it all? We
had been so sure, and had laughed at the absurdities and
29 5

D I A L O G U E OF THE HEART

contradictions of bourgeois or Christian thought, but to our

own we had never confessed. We had raged against the injustice
of capitalism-but we believed that justice and inj ustice were
economically determined, that all justice, in fact, was dass
justice: we argued that man under capitalism was a wage-slave
-under socialism we were going to plan everything in the
state down to the last shoelace : we preached freedom-but
freedom, we were convinced, was a bourgeois illusion : we
believed that under socialism man's spirit would flower-but
we were materialists and did not give tuppence for the spirit:
we waxed eloquent about the prostitution of art under capital
ism-but as Marxists or Freudians we had no more belief in
its independence than in the impartiality of j ustice : we said
war was devilish, but we fomented class-war.
I acknowledged the original ethical impulse-the generous
sympathy with the poor and oppressed-in which leftism was
born, but recoiled in sorrow from the malice, envy and
social hatreds which were the contemporary fruits of what had
begun as a struggle to redeem man from just these things.
Leftism now seemed to me to be some kind of disease itself,
which I had caught when young, and never become cured of,
a disease like that strange condition in which a man loses his
sense of balance and crawls and swarms over the earth in the
most nauseating contortions when what he most needs is to
walk upright. I was sick of leftism, but the world was sick to
death.

CHAPTER E I GHTEEN

Not My D eserving

ow as I walked about Essex lanes, or took the paths across

N wide, unhedged fields bordered by ragged elms through

which came the sea-blink and wave-glitter of the wide estuary,

or drove through summer scents of hay and wild briar to my
lecturing appointments at gunsites, I wondered what faith was
now possible to me. Experiences such as art and poetry, and
longings for love and for truth, which to materialism were
residual, were now to me central to the human condition.
They were the guarantee of man's humanity: without them,
he would be less than a beast, for he lacked a beast's instinctual
heritage. Man was a creature of the spirit, and witnessed to
the spirit, and was nothing without spirit. Could one believe
in spirit, and not believe in Spirit, too?
I had been reading a work of Michael Roberts called The
Modem Mind. It was an effort, on the part of one who had
played a part more prominent than mine in aesthetic 'leftism',
to say 'good-bye to all that'. Though I do not now remember
clearly any particular arguments in it, it did fall upon me like
a thunderclap, as I read it, that the way in which my genera
tion wrote and thought was local, peculiar to a certain time
and place, even parochial. It was only our arrogance which had
made us take it for granted that our way of thinking was the
only possible way-the result, like the structure of our bodies,
of many centuries of evolutionary struggle to get j ust where we
had got. No such thing, Michael Roberts intimated : this flatter
ing view had to be discarded. It is open to man to choose one of
many valid intellectual positions. And what I saw most particu
larly was that man could be equipped with a different set of
297

N O T MY

D ESERVING

values from those of my own age: another kind of spiritual

geometry would present man with quite another vision of the
world. Medieval thought was just such an alternative spiritual
geometry, opening up to man's soul visions of heaven and hell
closed to the blinkered modern mind. It was not that medieval
ism was right and modernism wrong: perhaps both were right
and both were wrong. The important thing is that they were
different and valid. I t was possible, without illusion or self
deception (the modern view of medievalism) to think in quite a
different way: 'think', however, is a poor cerebral word for the
kind of total apprehension of reality I conceived.
One's total experience, in another climate of time, could
add up to a vision, an embrace of reality foreign to that my
contemporaries were making. Man could, like a searchlight
beam, swivel himself at the universe. What was in his beam was
strangely lit, and sharply true: but this did not mean that there
was nothing outside the beam. I felt the beam of my own
spirit turning among the stars in an are which began to embrace
the spiritual and personal universe and probe at the cloud
behind which might be God.
None of my arguments here really explains the immense
tide of hope stirring in me. I saw that I was moving fast to an
unknown destination : the rush of my own spirit towards a new
freedom was so rapid as to frighten me. I became dizzy at
times with expectation of revelation. Walking one night, the
thought of the boundless spiritual experience open to man broke
suddenly upon me, and I slapped my thigh and said to myself,
half-reproachfully, 'You'll be believing in God next !' At that
moment I knew that I did, and was at once elated, and afraid
of what new obligations this might place upon me. Grace,
Peguy said, is insidious : it is full of surprises.
The struggle to unravel what I did believe moved Christian
ity from the periphery of my experience to the centre it had
occupied in childhood. Christ, the mysterious, suffering figure
at th:: heart of Christianity, the God done to death by man, as
man constantly does to death his own spirit, now became, for
all one's questions about Him, the most moving and frightening
symbol in the whole of history. I could see that if it were all
quite untrue, that if there had never been a Christ, mankind
would spiritually be worse offthan ifit were historical fact-for
that man should have invented it, would be the most devastating
298

NOT MY DESERVING

revelation of the human condition possible, a parable horn

of the insight of a dark angel into the constant crucifixion of
God in the world.
If the world was the scene of a spiritual struggle of which
the war against the evil of the Nazi regime was only one aspect,
then the decision to exhaust oneself for the victory of the
spirit had its origin and resting place in God. With what
longing, with what aching of the heart, I sought to come near
to this God, and to hear His word if He existed and could speak
it. But around me there was only silence : the enigma of the
impenetrable, unspeaking material world, closing me in a
kind of prison, and the enigma of the men by whom I was
surrounded, men like myself, a prey to the same doubts and
passions, but into whose inner being I could never hope to
penetrate.
Much of this debate with my heart went on while I was
lying on my bed in the warm barrack-room. But there, the
wireless was usually at full blast: an intolerable onslaught on
the nerves came from a highly popular programme called
' Penny on the Drum'. When it grew difficult to think I would
drift morosely round the room to find someone to play chess
with. There was a lance-corporal out of the regimenta! office
who would sometimes play with me, and talk about his
wife throughout the game. He would smile wistfully at me
when he handled his queen and say, 'I wish it was Jenny. I
always try and picture just what she's doing at every moment
of the day'. If I had my despair, he had his, and he would
live his dreams as he stretched on his bunk in the evening, his
eyes filled with tears at the loneliness of his pretty little wife.
He had been married only a few months and separation was
bitter.
If the barrack-room was impossible I would walk, swinging
over the ringing road to Great vVakering, to the Exhibition
Inn, a vast dome of glittering stars above me, Orion striding
high among them, as I had so often seen him above Christ
church spire at home, and the wind coming in from the sea.
It was a strange, forgotten coast, reserved and self-communing
like all lost lands. Parts of it, even towns along it, like Dunwich,
had sunk beneath the waves. The wind perpetually combed it.
When the wind was in the west, the grass of the flat, endless
marshy islands tossed its manes, the estuary was whipped with
299

N O T MY D E S ERVING

grey showers and white horses roamed it. When the wind was
in the east the grass lay flat, the estuary was glassy as air, and
an invisible, icy, North Sea flood poured everywhere, its blades
of cold needling through one's thick, rough uniform. The
receding tide left miles and miles of sand as it went out six,
eight, twelve miles in some places. An Experimental station in
the neighbourhood fired its trial shells from ballistic tabernades
along the coast, and measured the invisible flight with their
occult instruments. The booming would shake the barrack
rooms, and when the driving band of a shell came off it would
keen and twang in the air around us like a pursuing spirit.
From the tiny shelters on Shoeburyness Front, where the
children came to play and talk with me*, I would often watch
the thin lip of the tide recede until it vanished altogether. And
across the barren grey and gold sand the broad-wheeled carts
of the Experimental Station would follow the white rim of
water, to dig out the fallen shells which buried themselves
deep in the quaking mire, and the carts, too, would dwindle
and dwindie until they vanished from sight, dean over the rim
of the earth. Here the coast was entirely given up to the flat
saltings where the sheep grazed behind ruined dykes, and
stranded hulks showed black ribs like the skeletons of whales;
the terns hunted prettily, and the peewits played checkers in
the sky, and gulls showered down like confetti, while in a score
of places the brilliant mallard slept, head under wing, on the
shores of those fantastic, grass-crowned islets carved by the sea.
No place bare enough to match my own solitude could I have
found anywhere else.
One night of great agitation of soul I abandoned the rackety
barrack room only to find the sea fog trampling over the
garrison town. Often one could watch it slide in from the
estuary, a palpable wall riding the tide, and smothering one in
the harsh rankness of earth, water and frost. Where could I go?
In the schoolroom a dass was going on under the rosy gleam of
Meacher, and so I could not sit there and play Schubert's
songs on my flute. The Naafi? The Church Hut? I had little
money: I had a wish, too, for quiet and darkness, for the roads
in which I heard nothing but my own footsteps sounding frostily
on the macadam or echoing from the walls of farm buildings
across the black ploughland.
* I have told the story in Heron Lake: A Norfolk Year.

300

N OT MY DESERVING

True, the fog was symbolic for me: it was the texture of my
own dark turmoil, with its boiling and bubbling. But even a
fog is not simply confusion : like a soul it obeys the laws of its
being. It was uncanny how one could feel in its motion the
turn of a quite invisible tide. In the hour of slack water it
would swirl and drift backwards and forwards, an unsteady
thing, but let the tide once move in the estuary and it caught
the contagion of its motion, and in the inexorable swirl of its
fumes past one's freezing ears was a sea rhythm, a measured
tread of the waves far away from which it had birth. Same
times it would ftow right out with the retreating tide and leave
the air clear and every leaf and twig hung with the crystals of
its condensation.
By shutting me within myself the fog made the conception
which was haunting me as acute as a vision. I wanted to
pursue the vision as I walked, but blundering into dripping
trees and wet iron gateposts was no joke. It was folly to be
slipping blindly about in the narrow Shoebury streets, in fear
of buses and army vehicles, while my spiritual pulse beat
faster and faster. I groped my way into the little cinema and
sat, for the very small sum, sixpence or so, which was all I had,
on the benches among the leg-swinging, foot-scraping children
at the front. The place was airless, with the stale smell of all
those shuttered rooms where human beings constantly crowd
together. The projector whirred and shot its silver beam through
the tobacco smoke, and the vast, inhuman profiles on the
screen brayed and bobbed at us. Mothers nursed peevish babies
around me, and in the dull bits the boys stamped out to the
lavatories. I cannot remember now the films which held the
huddled, streaming mass of us silent for most of the time, but
the gloaming reminded me of Plato's cave.
Let me show you, Plato said to Glaucon (in the Seventh
Book of Tlze Republic) how enlightened or unenlightened we
reaiiy are. lmagine human beings living in an underground
den, which has a mouth open towards the light: the creatures
of the den have been kept there from childhood, so chained
that they cannot turn their heads, but can Iook only in front
of them. Behind them somewhere a fire is blazing and between
the fire and the prisoners, files of men are passing and their
shadows are projected on to a wall in front of the prisoners.
The prisoners would know nothing but shadows and would
301

N O T MY DESERVING

imagine that the shadows were real. And if they were suddenly
released, Plato asked, and enabled to look at the light, or the
sun, or upon real things, would they not be so distressed and
dazed as to prefer the dark, and the shadows they understood,
to the light which seemed to deceive them? Are we not, in
truth, like these men?
The Transcendent Reality, now fluttering about my ears,
to which I was almost superstitiously afraid to give the word
God after all the barren years ofdenial of Him, must I thought,
be rather like the cinema operator: it threw befare us the
absorbing spectacle of the changing material world. While we
had our eyes on that thrilling spectacle it was difficult to doubt
its reality, and one forgot to ask by what device it came
there. Why ask that of something which was larger than
life and somehow more real than one's own heart? But I was
now convinced that the world was much like the film, super
latively convincing, and full of the most impressive reality,
yet it was in truth secondary and contingent in the universe,
it was the projection of the Will of whatever lay beyond it
and at one throw of the switch it could be halted and fizzle,
as would presently the picture on the screen, into nothingness.
I tried to stare through the screen, and the wall, and the
foggy sky beyond, into the very eyes of a God, by whom I
myself was seen, holding the universe in the grasp of His
hands. What a long way I had gone, round and round the
houses, only to come back to the most intense conviction, to
the first and greatest love of my boyhood and youth.

302